


Two for Slashing

by rainaftersnowplease



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sports, Eventual Smut, F/F, Hockey, Slow Burn, They're Canadian so frankly I'm surprised there aren't more of these
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-20 23:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11345010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainaftersnowplease/pseuds/rainaftersnowplease
Summary: A Hollstein professional hockey AU.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has become something of a passion project of mine. I'll try to have an update out every couple of weeks or so for y'all.
> 
> You'll probably see a few song lyrics at the beginning of some of the chapters, because I'm a sap, and you'll just have to deal with that.
> 
> Hits, comments, and kudos are very much appreciated (even if I'm not always the best at replying). So thank you, in advance, for any and all of them.

* * *

 

The living room of 307 Downsborough is the perfect place to watch television late at night, its window far enough from the street that intruding streetlights cannot ruin its perfect dark. And tonight, sitting atop its sagging leather couch, wrapped in four blankets and face awash in bright blue light, Laura Hollis takes full advantage. She hasn’t looked away in nearly twenty minutes, and from the speakers comes a jovial voice to clash with the tight ball of anxiety in her gut.

“About to start the third now, Randy,” it says. “And we’ve had a defensive dandy so far tonight, haven’t we?”

“Boy are you right, Craig,” the other commentator joins his fellow. The image flashes from their smiling faces to an overhead view of the teams warming up. “And we weren’t expecting this. You know, these two teams are known for pushing the rush and really trying to play outside their own zone. What we’ve seen so far has been some sloppy offensive play, and a couple of really good performances in net.”

The screen flashes again, this time to a close-up of one of the players: a woman with dark eyes and a mouth slanted so serious it might be angry. Laura’s frantic heart skips two beats and then picks back up in double time. The woman on the screen twirls the stick in her hands twice, the blade whirling in and out of view as the camera follows her brooding glide over the ice. She bites her lower lip, chewing at a bit of dead skin there or out of her own anxiety, maybe. Either way, Laura’s cheeks warm at the sight, and she finds herself very thankful for the dark (her solitude on the couch notwithstanding).

Craig intrudes then, giving commentary to her heart’s embarrassing flutters:

“Only three shots on goal for Karnstein tonight,” he says. His voice lilts up in the middle of the sentence in surprise, though he brings the end of his words back to a lower, neutral register. Laura can’t say she blames him: it _is_ peculiar how little offense the game has seen so far. “Portland has done a good job of keeping her out of the high slot and off the breakaway. We’re used to seeing her take control of games, and there just hasn’t been much opportunity tonight.”

Laura bristles at the implication that she’s failed, sitting up straighter on the couch with a deep frown and a creased forehead. The hot anger in her chest does not abate even when Randy chimes in to defend her with highlights from the first two periods.

“Lack of opportunity is a good way to put it,” he says. “But even when she’s had chances, she’s squandered them. Big players make big plays in big games. The Panthers will be looking for more than what we saw in the first two periods from Karnstein to close things out.”

Laura watches again what she had earlier seen in real time: Carmilla a yellow streak on the ice, jumping up on the attack. An errant pass steals her momentum; she twists herself to her backhand side to catch the puck as it sails behind her, and the delay allows a red-sweatered defenseman to body her into the boards. Laura flinches at the contact, closing one eye, mouth open over her teeth in a grimace. If anything, it looks worse in slow motion, when she can see Carmilla’s frustration and pain evident on her face through the play.

The next clip: Carmilla a half stride ahead of two streaking defenders, the puck on her stick. She drags it from her forehand to the back of her blade and flicks it upward and toward the net. Laura hadn’t seen the manoeuver in real time; it had been too quick. The goalie doesn’t stand a chance – she’s still lunging from the far corner of her crease when Carmilla takes the shot – but the puck only clangs off the post and bounces wide. Carmilla takes another vicious hit from a trailing defenseman for her trouble.

“Toronto hasn’t been able to keep her out of trouble all game – she’s not used to being unprotected like this, Craig,” Randy continues when the television refocuses on the two broadcasters. He turns to Craig and opines further: “I think missing their best enforcer is starting to take its toll. Portland is flying all over the ice, hitting their forwards with impunity.”

Guilt shivers down Laura’s spine, empty and cold in place of her fiery indignation just moments earlier. She pulls her blankets closer around her, and tries with every ounce of her will not to feel as though she’s letting Carmilla down.

“I agree, Rand,” Craig nods in trite sportscaster sagacity. “The Panthers are certainly missing Hollis on the blue line tonight.”

Laura mutes the broadcast. The commentators continue to talk smilingly at each other for the next few minutes, but Laura’s eyes burn and blur with held back tears. She’d been especially weepy since leaving the team to come home. Good reason to be or not, that fact is still embarrassing.

Carmilla’s face flashes on the screen again, then. A chyron under her chin declares a scoreless tie. The camera must be close: before the screen fades to black for the last commercial break, she looks right at it. Her eyebrows lift; she crooks her mouth into a cheeky grin that has Laura grinning back at the TV, and she _winks_. Heat rushes up Laura’s throat to her cheeks, and not from embarrassment this time. She swallows her grin back down. There will be time for girlish swooning _after_ the Panthers win this game.

The broadcast fades to black, and when the screen lights up again, it shows a commercial for some sugary breakfast cereal. Laura reaches for her mug on the coffee table again, and brings it to her lips. She tips it and her head all the way back before remembering that she’d finished its chocolatey contents during a particularly harrowing bit of game in which Portland seemed to set up camp in the Panther’s defensive zone.

She decides she’ll need more if she’s to survive the third period.

Laura unmutes the TV, so the start of the third period doesn’t take her by surprise, and shucks herself out of her blanket cocoon to shuffle into the dark kitchen for more cocoa. Her dad never keeps the good stuff around anymore: all she finds in the cupboards is a store-brand powder in white little packets. She selects one proclaiming to have twenty percent more mini marshmallows, plucks it from its cardboard home, and dumps its contents into her empty mug. She goes about preparing the milk next, sloshing it into a pan and leaving it to heat on the stove. Alone in the dark kitchen, she takes a frosty swig from the jug before she returns it to the fridge, and wipes the resulting, incriminating mustache off her lip with the back of her hand.

The television moves on to a car commercial. A smooth voice, speaking in an American accent, floats to the kitchen, extolling the virtues of hand-stitched leather seats and climate control. It’s quiet otherwise – Laura’s friends had invited her to watch the game at her local haunt, but she’d feigned jet lag and begged off. They had left without her, and even though she had asked them to leave her be, she remains a bit sad at how easy it had been to make them go.

Feeling abandoned by people she’d _told_ to leave isn’t one of Laura’s finer moments, but no one is around now to begrudge her the indignation. So she lets herself feel it. It’s decidedly easier to feel than the anxiety that threatens to pull her back to the living room before the nice woman on the television is done singing praises to probiotics in banana yogurt.

She leans back against the counter opposite the stove. Its edge digs into her ass just like she remembers it. A fourth commercial strobes on the television, throwing muted, pulsing light across the kitchen floor. There couldn’t be many more before the game came back on, so Laura pushes off the counter and looms over the pot of steaming milk. She squints. It looks like it might be done, but there’s only one way to know for sure. She skims one careful finger over the liquid's surface and finds it warm, if not piping as she’d prefer.

There isn’t time to wait for it to simmer, so she makes do: pours it over the brown powder in her mug and waves off the bit of it that dusts up towards her face. Blobs of sticky brown goo float to the top, the rest of the powder already melted by the milk’s heat. She reaches below her waist and tugs open the silverware drawer – or at least what to her habit _should_ be the silverware drawer.

Reaching inside, her fingers connect with only the sharp edge of a roll of Scotch tape, the rounded curvature of a lighter, and the looped steel handle of a potato masher. She looks down in confusion – the spoons should be in this drawer. Laura throws a glance over her shoulder at the stove, then down again at the contents of the drawer. Confirming her place in the kitchen does not help her confusion. Suddenly, she’s fighting back tears again.

There’s a sob threatening to crest in her throat, but Laura holds her breath and beats back the waves. She grips the round handle of the drawer below her much harder than she should. It strains under her force, its connection to the wood of the drawer creaking and groaning in the dark.

Before anything more dramatic can come of her momentary lapse in spatial awareness, Randy and Craig start bloviating again. She opens the adjacent drawer. The spoons _are_ in this one, nestled in the divider with the other cutlery. She grabs a teaspoon from the pile and drops it into her mug, where it plops to the bottom and sends a small wave cresting over the lip and down her hand. Laura licks up her skin and over the side of the mug on her way back to the living room, and folds herself atop her blankets.

She stirs her cocoa while Randy and Craig go over more highlights from the first two periods, this time some fantastic saves by both goalies. Laura’s brow knots the more she watches her team’s defensemen allow shots from favorable angles, and fail to tip passes into the slot. They’re not taking the body enough on the blue line, leaving the Otters’ defensemen too much time and space to create chances for their forwards. She can only imagine how her team’s locker room must have been during the fifteen minutes between periods. The Panthers’ coach is easily annoyed, and lack of physical play annoys her maybe more than anything else.

“We’re just about ready to get back to the action here, Craig,” Randy declares. He appears to be right: players on the screen are exiting the ice for their respective benches. The ten who remain take their places at center ice. Carmilla is the last to take her position, gliding to a stop and stooping before her counterpart across the red center line. She and the opposing center look at the referee in unison, and he takes a glance at them both in turn.

There’s a moment, then, before the referee begins to drop the puck, when Laura can almost imagine herself there. It’s in the little things that makes her palms itch: the urge to drop her stick from her knees to rest the blade on the ice, and give her gloves one last tug before the action begins. She can feel the way the ice radiates cold in the small absence of movement before the puck drops, can hear her own breathing loud in her ears. She doesn’t like being still on the ice. Especially for a defenseman, motion is the imperative. If you still, you’re lost.

Too soon for her own liking, the moment ends. The referee drops the puck, there’s a violent scuffle of sticks for its control, and the players on both sides scatter away from the center like electrons circling their nucleus.

Carmilla wins the draw: tangles her own stick with the opposing center’s and pushes up against her to hold her in place. Her left winger comes across the red line to scoop the puck out from beneath their feet and they’re off. Carmilla slides back and twists to her backhand side, spinning forward and leaving the other center a step or two behind her to join the attack.

The rubber band ball of anxiety is back in Laura’s chest.

“Here we go, Craig,” Randy says. The camera switches to a wide side angle to capture the Panthers setting up their attack. “First one to a goal wins, you think?”

“I do, Rand,” Craig says. “And if I know this Panther first line, they’re not going to want to leave that goal to the last second. I expect a good sustained attack from this first shift of the period for them.”

The attack comes quickly, and Laura is glad for it. This is much nicer than watching her goalie bail out her defense over and over. The left winger who’d taken the puck, drops it behind the net to a streaking Carmilla. She’s a comet over the goal line, sliding backwards, her head up and on a swivel. Laura has seen her survey the ice so many times, she thinks it shouldn’t move her anymore.

It does, of course: the way she pushes into the high slot like the tide, defenders welling up to meet her. She’s moved with her over the cold surface – stalking over the blue line, stick blade scraping the ice. She’s received the ticky-tack, tape-to-tape flick of a pass Carmilla now pushes to the far defenseman. And Laura has taken the long, angled shot on goal and hoped for a favor of geometry to deflect it home to the waiting twine at the back of the net.

No such luck for her stand-in. The puck sails through defense and forwards all and finds its easy home in the goalie’s glove. She covers it quickly – no room to clear it with so much noise atop the crease and just outside. Carmilla straightens from her circling back and forth to the boards. The frown is back on her face, but set more like steel now than it had been between periods. She holds her shoulders high, tense even from the odd camera angle the broadcast affords. Laura doesn’t recall ever seeing her so uncomfortable with skates on.

The defenseman who took the shot skids over to her. She’s a head and a half taller, and she’s not happy. Carmilla tries to wave her off, and Laura drops her forehead into her palm. They can’t be fighting now. Not when Laura isn’t there to play peacemaker. They’ll need to act like professionals on their own for the next eighteen minutes.

Randy agrees with her: “It looks like we’ve got some difference of opinion between Karnstein and Lawrence before this offensive zone faceoff.”

“Now’s not the time for your best forward and your only blue line sniper to be at odds,” Craig chimes in. “I hope whatever the problem is, they get it sorted out before this puck drop. Toronto can’t afford not to be firing on all cylinders here.”

Laura tries to read Danny’s lips, but picture isn’t defined enough for her to make out more than the angry slant of them. She regrets not going to the bar now – she knows for a fact there’s an enormous HD screen directly over the whiskey wall that she’s sure would have done the trick. Danny finally gets Carmilla to look at her, and Laura can’t see the smaller woman’s face, but the way she whips her head around and stops on her edges tells her that Danny hasn’t exactly defused the tension so much as set it alight.

“Come on, guys,” she whispers, pleading.

Mel comes between them, then. She grabs them both by the scruff and pushes them apart. Danny acquiesces: whatever’s got her mad at Carmilla, she listens to her captain. Carmilla is less obliging. She rips Mel’s hand away and spins back to the faceoff circle. The two defensemen glare after her for a moment before they take their places as well. Mel shakes her head as she bends at the waist to ready herself for the drop.

Carmilla scrapes the inside edge of her right skate against the ice. Twice.

She’s nervous.

And loses the faceoff.

Danny and Mel circle back to their own blue line to meet the rush that follows. Carmilla is slow on the back check. Laura grits her teeth and _wills_ her to move faster, fisting her hands in the blankets underneath her and pushing her toes into the carpet. She’s half a stride behind the puck carrier and not gaining quickly enough.

“Poke,” Laura whispers, urgent. “Come on, Carm!”

She does, and the stick check is not pretty.

The point of a poke check isn’t necessarily to hit the puck: it’s small and any good forward will protect it with her body and her stick. The point of a poke check is to hit the legs or the stick, to stall the forward long enough for her to either lose control of the puck, or pass it to someone else.

So Carmilla, of course, prods at the puck first, lancing her stick around the legs of her mark, and fails to connect. The second poke is better: she taps the blade of the opposing forward’s stick with her own – not enough to be called for hooking or slashing but enough to affect how she handles the puck. The bit of extra effort slows her feet, and Carmilla slashes into her path. Her hips, Laura thinks, are a little high when she turns to skate backwards and hassle the forward further. But she can’t argue the result: she hampers her mark enough that the other girl has to flick the puck back between her legs in the neutral zone to prevent turning it over entirely.

Carmilla is better on the forecheck. As soon as the puck slides over the red line, she’s churned a small circle in the ice and rocketed all her momentum into a forward push to pressure the defenseman who collects it. It’s pressure mostly for its own sake: the puck is sent skittering across the ice to the Otters’ second defenseman before Carmilla can reach for it with her stick. She churns another circle and retakes her place in the neutral zone after that. Laura is proud of the sequence: solid neutral zone play isn’t flashy, but it’s what keeps the other team out of the Panther’s defensive zone. Carmilla may not be a true two-way forward, but she’s lightyears from the beginning of the year, when she hardly bothered to get in front of the puck in the neutral zone at all.

Laura is, in fact, so busy watching Carmilla skate in oblong patterns after the puck like she knows what she’s doing on defense that she doesn’t notice Danny flatten the Otters’ center to the ice on the blue line. The crowd and the broadcasters alert her, the latter hissing through their teeth. The center doesn’t get up again, and it doesn’t take the refs long to stop play so she can be seen to. A hush falls over the crowd then, and the stillness lasts a few minutes before she’s helped off the ice.

Danny goes to the box for charging – “Bullshit!” Laura cries at the TV as she’s led off by the elbow – and the team readies for the biggest penalty kill of the season. Carmilla isn’t on a kill unit – it’s a wonder her plus/minus is as good as it is at even strength, frankly – so she zips her way to the bench and takes her seat to wait. The camera follows her for a moment, and Laura watches her rip one of her gloves off to shoot water into her mouth as she surveys the ice from her seat.

Her friends Craig and Randy are opining about the upcoming power play for the Otters, but Laura is too busy watching Carmilla point the nozzle of her water bottle at her forehead and douse herself to catch exactly what it is they say. She watches water run down her stupid, perfect cheekbones until the picture shifts back to the action on the ice, and then she jolts in place as though there’s anyone around to have caught her staring. She takes a rather large gulp of her cocoa and tries to ignore the heat rising in her chest and settling in her cheeks.

That heat wanes into a shivery-cold anxiety when, a minute and a half later, the Otters put the puck past the Panthers' goalie and take the lead. Danny siddles out of the penalty box with her head down. Laura tips the dregs of her cocoa into her mouth and skims the ridge of her mug with nervous teeth. She has to slap a hand to her right leg to stop it bouncing, and when even that doesn’t stop her heel from tapping the floor in a nervous, broken rhythm, she stands and paces back and forth before the TV.

Two goals are probably too much to hope for, but the way things are going now, she doesn’t exactly have a good feeling about overtime. Carmilla steps on the ice again for the first shift after the power play goal, and instead of taking her place immediately at center ice, she glides over to Danny’s spot in the circle. Laura freezes mid-stride, and Danny on the screen straightens in what she’s sure is the same anticipatory anxiety.

This game will be the death of her, Laura is sure of that.

“Don’t be an ass,” she pleads like Carmilla can hear her through the TV and over three thousand miles away. Like she’d listen even if she could.

But Carmilla smiles – or at least her mouth curls as close to one as it ever does – and she says something that has Danny laughing. She punches Carmilla in the shoulder, the way she hits Laura when she’s approving of something she’s done, and Carm lets the blow push her back to the center of the rink, her grin wider even than before. It doesn’t relieve all of the fear Laura feels – and she starts pacing again – but there’s a little bubble of hope in her belly now, too.

If Danny and Carmilla are getting along, the rest of the period should be very interesting at _least_.

Carmilla wins the faceoff, but she also takes an elbow to the chin when she turns up ice to join the attack. Laura shouts at the TV again, furious at the ref letting the teams play on in the face of such an egregious assault. Carmilla manages to keep her feet moving, opening her jaw wide as she can to test it as she flies over the blue line to the net. She gets there in time to deflect a pass from the point towards the goal, but her lateness means the goalie has time to set up shop before she shoots. It’s an easy stick save for her, and a rebound taken by the Otters. Carmilla grimaces on screen – from the pain in her jaw or in disapproval in her shot attempt, Laura can’t be sure.

She hustles on the back check, but luckily doesn’t get far. Danny makes a stunning play in the neutral zone, taking the puck from the Otter’s best winger. She skips it across the ice to Carmilla, who’s waiting just onside at the edge of the offensive zone. Laura stops her pacing to lean closer to the TV and watch.

She’ll think later that maybe she should have kept it up. Jinxes and good luck charms are not to be trifled with.

There is an Otter near Carmilla, but she’s at too sharp an angle to poke at the puck or hit her cleanly. So, she grabs Carmilla by the elbow. The ref can’t ignore this infraction – he signals for a penalty – but Carmilla still has the puck, so she keeps on the attack. She wrenches her arm free from the defenseman’s grip, snapping it away. Her sweater sleeve bunches at the wrist: getting free has knocked her elbow pad loose and dropped it from the joint it’s meant to protect.

The defenseman follows her, streaking towards the goalie in a desperate attempt to prevent a penalty from becoming a goal. She panics then, Laura thinks, because she doesn’t look at the puck as Carmilla starts deking from one side of the crease to the other. Instead, she brings her stick slashing across Carmilla’s body from behind. The hook of the blade catches at her unprotected elbow. When the defenseman tries to pull it free, she pulls Carmilla, who already has only one skate on the ice in the middle of her handle, down and backwards.

Later, Laura will watch the replay and realize that Carmilla getting a shot off at all after that slash is a goddamn miracle. But she does one better, even: being dragged backwards to the ice, on one skate, stick held in only one hand, Carmilla manages to _score_.

Everything happens at once. The puck hits the net, Carmilla hits the ice and then the goalie, the goal horn blares, and the crowd goes off like a bomb.

Laura launches herself into the air, fists raised and howling: “Tied, it’s _tied!_ ”

Her teammates swarm to the net, where Carmilla and the goalie are still trying to disentangle from one another. Danny gets there first, pushing Otters out of the way with probably more force than is necessary. When she gets to the two-woman scrum in the crease, the Otter’s goalie is already on her feet. And she’s – Laura has to squint to make sure she’s not seeing things – the goalie is waving to the Panther’s bench.

Danny looks to her feet, and makes a face like maybe she’ll be sick. Then she’s frantically hailing the bench, too. The players around her form a loose circle, with Danny, the goalie, and Carmilla in its center. Danny gestures broadly, yelling something now that maybe Laura would be able to lip-read, if she focused.

But her focus is not on Danny’s wild gesticulation. Laura focuses instead on the girl at her feet, laying there on her side with her back to the camera. The trainer makes his way from the bench and shuffle-slides over the ice to her, concern etched on his face.

Carmilla doesn’t get up.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rewind, rewind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. I moved recently, and that put a dent into my writing time - and just about all the other kinds of time I had, too. Thanks for staying, lovelies. I hope you enjoy this. I know I enjoyed writing it for you.

_Laura Hollis was eight years old when her father bought her first pair of hockey skates for her. He gave them to her in secret, on a snowy November morning near the lake behind their house. The skates were their secret from her mother, who had steadfastly refused to let Laura into anything without a toe pick._

_That day had been a disaster. The lake ice was rough and uneven, and little Laura had no idea how to start or stop with the edges of her skate blades. Her father had carried her back to the car at sundown, her bottom bruised and her wrists aching from catching fall after fall on the snowy rink. Laura had dozed in his arms, his stubbly beard tickling her forehead._

_She had gone to bed that night sniffling from soreness and dreamt of getting back on the ice._

 

[Two Years Earlier]

 

“It’s probably not going to be tonight,” Laura says. It’s the eleventh time she’s expressed the sentiment, and if she were opining to anyone but the redhead seated beside her on the couch, that might be a problem.

“You don’t know that,” Lola Perry pats her knee fondly as she says the words. She manages as always to split a perfect difference between motherly and condescending, pursing her lips and shaking her head. Ginger curls bounce to and fro with the jerky movement.

Laura smiles: “I’m not being broody,” she defends. “I just think the fourth round is a little much to hope for.”

Perry clucks her tongue, and pats Laura’s knee with a little more force, but doesn’t object again.

The pair are alone on the couch but not in the living room. Laura’s father hasn’t sat down in nearly an hour, since before the pre-draft show began and the pundits on ESPN had flashed her name on the screen briefly. She’d been buried in a list of potential fourth round draftees, and they hadn’t even said her name aloud, but her being listed alone had been enough to get her dad off the couch and pacing. He’s since ceased moving, at least, settling for standing cross-armed behind the couch and scowling at the television.

“It’ll be Toronto if you go tonight,” he predicts. When Laura cranes her neck back to look at him, he’s already looking at her. His eyes are steady where his body language is not: he’s as sure of what he says as he is anxious about the whole process.

Laura looks back at the television, and finds the howling Panther’s head logo on the draftboard. They have pick four of the fourth round, behind Portland, Atlanta, and New York, but that’s assuming they won’t trade it away before it comes up. This late in the draft, pick trading and proxy selections are common.

“I don’t know about that,” Laura says. On the screen, Portland’s general manager is at the podium. The Otters select a center from a school in Minnesota. The girl’s smiling face flickers into view, atop a short list of her accomplishments in college. “The Panthers don’t really play like they’d need someone like me.”

“Team chemistry is about balance, sweetheart,” her father says. Laura remains unconvinced. What use could the best offensive team in the league have for an enforcer like her? Her greatest contribution in the offensive zone in her entire college career had been knocking an opposing forward unconscious in a fight just inside the blue line.

Laura’s stomach seizes with dread. So far, her father and Perry – and via text her other ginger friend Lafontaine – have been all but guaranteeing that they’ll hear her name called. Laura wants to believe that – she’d accept an offer from a team on the moon if it meant playing hockey for a living – but tonight is the last bit of the draft that will be televised, and her agent hasn’t sent along any indication that she’ll be selected at all. There’s a very real chance that the playoff game her college team lost three weeks ago will become the last hockey game she ever plays at a competitive level. Laura scrapes a sweaty palm against the jean-clad thigh not occupied by Perry’s hand.

That thought is as unbearable has it has been impossible to ignore. It pounds in the back of her head with her anxious heartbeat. She swears if it gets any louder in her ears, Perry will be able to hear it beside her.

“You’ll get chosen, honey,” her dad says. He puts a hand on her shoulder. Laura knows that he means the gesture to be soothing, but she might as well be vibrating with nerves. Between his hand on her shoulder and Perry’s on her knee, it’s all she can do to stay on the couch. She grits her teeth and tries to focus on what the commentators are saying about the draft.

She realizes with a jolt that New York has already chosen: the team’s general manager is thanking the gathered crowd of reporters and stepping down from the podium. Before Laura can take a full, shaky breath through her mouth, Toronto’s general manager is taking his place.

The Panthers’ GM is something of an enigma in the league. Laura looks at her, and gets the impression of an attractive face that she’d have trouble picking out of a crowd. She’s a white woman, with high cheekbones and a square jaw. Her reddish-brown hair falls to just below her shoulders in glossy, uneven waves. When she stands at the podium, she brings her shoulders back and regards the crowd with a look that Laura thinks wouldn’t be out of place at a royal address. Her dark eyes scan the room before she speaks, her red lips curved into just a hint of a smile.

She doesn’t say Laura’s name.

“Sorry, Laura,” Perry says from her left. Laura shakes her head and then turns to look at her friend.

“We knew it would be a long shot that I’d get to stay so close to home,” she says. She hopes her smile is genuine. The look of cocked-headed concern Perry gives her then makes her think it might not look it.

“Someone else’ll pick you up,” her dad says. And maybe it’s Laura’s imagination, but there’s a hint of desperation in his voice now that her hometown team’s pick has come and gone.

“Sure, dad,” she replies, only because she doesn’t think he’s right, and the words are close enough to possible agreement that she can convince herself they’re not lies.

“You want some more cocoa?” he asks when she doesn’t say anything further.

Laura says yes, because she thinks saying no will arouse too much suspicion.

 

Laura goes to bed that night having sat through the rest of the fourth round and the post-round punditry. Her dad probably would have insisted they watch the Sportscenter recap, too, but Perry had politely excused herself to go home then, and Laura had made enough of a show of yawning and stretching that her dad had allowed her to tromp up to her room as well.

She lays under her covers, her back to her door, and types out a message:

[Laura]: Did you watch the whole thing?

A few minutes go by before her phone buzzes with a reply. She quickly opens it.

[LaF]: Yeah.

A couple of moments pass. Laura considers prodding more, but then another message buzzes into her inbox.

[LaF]: Sorry you didn’t get to hear your name on TV.

Laura laughs, though her throat is so dry from keeping in her anxious, frightened tears all night that it comes out low and hoarse.

[Laura]: That’s me. Always looking for the spotlight.

[LaF]: Are you okay?

Laura’s thumb hovers over the touchscreen. It’s a weird question, mostly because she doesn’t know how to answer it yet. This outcome had not been unexpected – she was most likely not going to be drafted at all, and this was known to her before the college season had even ended. But knowing something is true and being okay with it are two very different things, and Laura Hollis is nothing if not stubborn in the face of unpleasant truths.

[Laura]: I will be.

She hopes that will suffice. Lafontaine is her oldest friend, and has an uncanny knack for sussing out her secrets. They’re also not shy about those unpleasant truths Laura always struggles against.

[LaF]: I know you will be. But it’s okay if right now you’re not.

[Laura]: Thank you, oh fortune cookie master.

Lafontaine sends back a string of fortune cookie and heart emoji, and bids Laura a good day. Laura wishes they were with her tonight. They’d accepted a fellowship at a biology lab in Austria shortly before graduation, and had left the country for it soon after. Lafontaine was happiest elbow-deep in whatever muck needed analyzing, so Laura couldn’t be too upset about the arrangement.

She reads over the short conversation again, alone there in the dark. Her dad is still watching Sportscenter: she can hear muted voices, even garbled through her closed bedroom door. Night bugs make their noise outside, and the neighbors have their sprinklers on. The smell of wet grass and water float through her open window. Laura turns onto her back to stare at the ceiling and clicks her phone’s screen dark. She closes her eyes, but the buzzing behind her lids is loud, and she can feel her heart still pounding in her ears and fingertips. It’s like she’s just back from a run, instead of lying in bed after a night of sitting on the couch.

It takes her several hours, until the sun is starting to paint the skyline a bloody pink, for her to fall into a fitful sleep.

 

Draft disappointments don’t count as emergencies, so Laura finds herself back at work just two days later. Her manager gives her a sympathetic look when she walks in for her shift, and Laura has to endure a full fifteen minutes of platitudes from well-meaning coworkers before the breakfast rush begins and conversation becomes all but impossible.

Laura likes the café – it’s always busy in the mornings and early afternoons with the bustle of customers, the clink and clang of cups and spoons, and the drip and hiss of the espresso machine. Working behind the counter is a lot like working behind the blue line. She keeps herself moving, her hands busy with labeling cups, packing pucks, and pouring cream, and the work is manageable. Just like it is on the ice, as long as she doesn’t still, Laura isn’t lost.

But no café stays busy forever, and the hustle of the morning breakfast rush soon peters out to a slow tickle of walk-in customers and a few regular hangers-around. Laura’s manager gives her a broom and sets her cleaning the floors of the morning’s trash before he leaves for his classes. She takes longer than is probably necessary to sweep the floors, leaving the sparse business at the counter for her only remaining coworker to handle alone. She makes the work last until midmorning, stopping only when the last regular leaves the café and she and her fellow barista are alone in the cavernous space.

“Hey Betty,” she calls to her compatriot behind the counter. The other girl looks over at her, hands still at work cleaning the espresso machine while she diverts her attention. She raises an eyebrow by way of response.

Laura holds up a balled up pastry wrapper between them.

“How about a game?”

Betty rolls her eyes. She goes back to cleaning the machine and says, “We’re supposed to be working, Hollis.”

“Oh come on,” Laura prods. “No one’s here.”

The truth of her words seems to echo off the unoccupied furniture, but Betty doesn’t look up again. And Laura should just stop there: toss the wrapper in the trash and continue with her idle sweeping. But boredom is a stronger force than obligation, especially without a manager to make sure she attends to the latter.

She drops the wrapper on the floor instead, and stoops at the waist, holding her broom with the same sure grip she’d use to hold her hockey stick. The stiff bristles of the dollar-store broom in her hands are hardly as good as the gentle curve of her stick blade for generating lift, but neither is this her first time swiping litter off the floor on a trajectory for Betty Spielsdorf’s head.

The wrapper schluffs off the floor and smacks into her temple with a papery pop. Betty squares her shoulders to fix Laura with a glare that could probably melt ice. Laura wiggles the broom in the direction of the wrapper, now sitting incriminatingly on the counter next to Betty, and cracks a lopsided smile she hopes is charming.

Betty scoots the wrapper off the counter and into a trashcan below, using only the back of her palm. She graces Laura with one long eye roll and goes back to her damned espresso machine. Laura’s smile sinks back into a pursed-lipped frown.

“Okay, spoilsport, we can just,” Laura gestures broadly at the empty café, “take care of all these customers I guess.”

“I’m not going to play your dumb game, Hollis,” Betty doesn’t look up again, having moved on to scrubbing the wash sink. The damn thing is spotless, and Laura knows it.

“Have a little fun, Robobetty.” Her frown deepens. “Robetty.”

“Been working on that one all shift?” Betty asks, and though the remark is mostly sarcastic, Laura would swear on detecting just a hint of tease in it, too. Whether she’s imagining it, or the chink in that patented Spielsdorf armor is real, Laura decides to press.

“I haven’t had much else to do,” she says. “I tend to stop polishing things once they’re clean.”

“We can’t all be professional jocks, Hollis,” Betty deadpans. The light in her tone is gone, replaced by something cold. Laura finds herself flinching before she continues. “Oh, but right. You’re not one either, are you?”

“Harsh,” Laura complains. Then, softer as she puts broom to floor and starts to sweep again: “No need to go all super villain speech on me.”

She doesn’t try to tempt Betty again – no use invoking the ire of the beast twice in one shift – but neither does she continue to sweep the now-spotless floor. Instead, she folds herself into one of the squishy chairs in front of the old, empty fireplace at the center of the space. Laura fishes her phone from her apron pocket and clicks the screen into light.

She has one hundred and four new notifications.

She panics first – has something happened to one of her friends, or (she can barely think of this) to her dad? She opens the conversation at the top of the list – Lafontaine again – and reads through the typo-laden, capitalization nightmare that is their dozen or so messages.

One in the middle catches her attention, and holds it.

[LaF]: TORONTO. SIXTH ROUND. LAURA ARE YOU THERE OH MY GOD.

Laura is already calling them as she races out of the store with little but a backward shout at Betty about being back soon. Betty looks after, her brows slightly raised in condescension – or maybe indulgence. Laura doesn’t have time to care. She’s dialing LaFontaine’s number and has her phone to her ear before she can get the door open enough to slip outside.

Lafontaine picks up on the second ring.

“Finally, Laur, where have you been?”

“Working!” Laura shouts into the phone, indignant. She hears Lafontaine grunt at the volume, and lowers it to continue: “You said Toronto over text?”

“Yeah,” they confirm. Laura can hear their wide, earnest smile in even the single word. “Second-to-last pick of the whole thing. You did it, Laur.”

Laura feels suddenly as though she might float away – or for that matter, be sick with excitement. She finds an empty chair on the patio outside to fall into before her knees give way.

“You get to keep playing,” Lafontaine says next.

Laura marvels at how quickly her friend gets to the heart of things, as always. Because of course she’ll be paid, and she’ll get to travel, and she’ll get to come home to her hometown at the end of the day, but none of those things is _the_ thing.

She’ll get to play hockey, for at least a little while longer.

Laura stays there, jabbering incoherently on the phone with Lafontaine, until a very irritated Betty pops her head out of the café door to ask her, very sharply, to come and help with the afternoon rush.

 

The next few weeks are a whirlwind of paperwork and important phone calls. Laura signs an entry-level contract for the league minimum salary. She doesn’t care. She marks the calendar on her bedroom wall with a countdown to the day development camp begins at the beginning of July, and lets her dad parade around the house and in town in a custom Panthers jersey with her name on the back.

He and Perry see her off on the bus to the city, with her hockey bag and a single suitcase in tow. He hugs her for a bit too long, as he always does when she leaves home. Laura doesn’t begrudge him the affection – she’ll miss him too while she’s away. Perry hugs her, too, but her embrace is much swifter. Before Laura can do more than snap her arms around her, Perry is already pulling away. She pushes a Tupperware container filled with chocolate chip cookies into Laura’s hands, though. Laura makes a mental note not to eat all of them on the bus ride ahead of her.

After promising her dad she’ll call when she gets settled, and assuring Perry that she’ll be responsible with how she consumes those cookies, Laura stuffs her luggage into the bus’s undercarriage compartment and boards to find her seat. She slumps against the window when she finds it, stores her stick blade-down between her legs, and pops her earbuds in. She tunes her iPod to her travel playlist, an airy mix of singer-songwriters crooning about going home or finding adventure. She won’t get through the whole thing before getting to the city – the bus ride is only a couple of hours long – but she closes her eyes and lets the music carry away the anxiety that comes with the prospect of meeting her new teammates.

Laura jerks awake, then, to the voice of the driver announcing their arrival in the city proper. She clicks her dry tongue against the roof of her mouth and tries to blink the sleep away from her eyes. The terminal is crowded, a sea of colors and noise, and Laura grips the handle of her stick in defense against it. The bus comes to a screeching, hissing halt, and passengers at the front begin to disembark. Figuring she can’t just wait on the bus forever, Laura waits her turn and then takes it, shuffling off the bus when an opening appears in the aisle. She takes a moment just at the bottom of the bus’s steps to breathe in the smoggy terminal air and stretch her legs. The trip and her stillness in sleep have left them cramped. She shakes them out on her way to collect her bags from the undercarriage compartment.

There’s supposed to be someone from the team – another player or just a front office representative, the email she got from the general manager’s office wasn’t clear – here to meet her. The email also didn’t indicate where she was supposed to go in the massive bus terminal to find this person. So Laura does the next best thing to knowing where she’s going: she follows the flow of the crowd. It pushes her down the corridor, away from the arrival gate and towards a massive, tile-floored concourse. The smell of street food, greasy and inviting after having skipped breakfast and power-napped on a bus, wafts stronger and stronger as she moves further down. Fewer electric lights dot the walls of the widening hallway, their light replaced by the sun. When she steps through the mouth of the corridor and onto the concourse proper, she sees its point of entry: great windows set high into the wall in front of her, their half-colored surfaces throwing beautiful, patterned light in all directions in the busy station.

Laura hitches her hockey bag higher onto her shoulder. It’s impossible to see the entrance to the station through the wall of people in front of her, but she makes her way toward the glass wall in the hope that it’s the right direction for her to go. She tries to keep her eyes open for anyone looking for her, but navigating the sea of bodies as it swells and pushes her quickly has her moving away from her destination. She gets turned around, the sun at her back, and curses her luggage and her tiny frame.

It’s then that a strong hand grips her by the shoulder, tugging her backwards into the waves. She looks back and then up – into the face of a redheaded girl who makes quite a good lighthouse. Or so Laura would say, if she was given to that sort of metaphorical fancy.

(She very much is, of course.)

“Are you Hollis?” her beacon asks. Laura has to squint up into the sun to see her face.

“That’s me,” she confirms, holding a hand to her forehead to act as a visor against the glare.

Not a lighthouse, of course, greets her gaze, but a woman: tall, with eyes like the sky, like a calm ocean, blue and true.

 _That’s overdramatic, Laura,_ she thinks to herself.

“I’m Danny,” the lighthouse shouts over the din of the crowd. “I’m a Panther.”

Laura knows that. She does. Danny Lawrence is in her second year with the team, now. She’s arguably the best blue-line sniper in the league, and coming off winning the award for the league’s best defenseman in her rookie year. Laura watched her play on weeknights when her homework was light last year, and wished for a slap shot half as strong. Seeing the woman on TV, and standing beneath her gentle blue gaze in a sea of swarming people are two very different things, though.

“Let’s get out of here,” Danny suggests, tugging at Laura’s elbow to lead her to the doors. “I can barely hear myself think in all this noise!”

Laura follows her, dragging her suitcase behind her as Danny parts the ocean of people ahead. It’s decidedly easier to move through the crowd with Danny as her snowplow – people seem to _try_ to get out of her way, where they had seemed to press in on Laura from all sides before. Laura chalks it up to the difference a few inches can make, and decides to be grateful for the assistance.

They emerge from the terminal to a beautiful sunny afternoon. It remains loud, but without the glass walls and ceiling of the terminal to enclose them, the noise seems to dissipate into the air rather than intensify. Laura sighs in relief.

“Yeah, this is much better,” Danny agrees beside her. She looks down at Laura with a smile as warm as the summer air around them. “I’ve been sent to pick you up and take you to the team’s facility. If that wasn’t clear before.”

Laura smiles back: Danny’s grin is as infectious as it is attractive.

“It was, but thank you,” she says.

“Welcome to Toronto,” Danny says. She motions for Laura to follow her into the parking lot before them. “We’re in the day lot, this way.”

Laura lets Danny walk a few strides ahead of her before she follows – just because she doesn’t know the way, of course.

“Is this your first time in the city?” Danny asks as they move together over the asphalt.

“No,” Laura says. “Nationals for club hockey was always here or in Ottawa. And my university team had a few playoff games here last year.”

“Ever get here for anything other than hockey?” Danny amends with a laugh.

“No,” Laura admits. “I guess the big city has always kind of meant hockey to me.”

“There’s a lot more to it than the rink,” Danny says. They’ve entered a covered parking structure, and being out of the heat is welcome after the sticky sleep of her bus ride and wading through the crowds in the terminal.

“I’m sure I’ll have time to explore after mini-camp,” Laura speculates. She frowns before continuing. “If I’m still with the team, then. I might go to development league for the year, according to my agent. They’re based a few hours away, right?”

Danny turns her head back to look at Laura, “Yeah, that’s right. But you’ll have time to get to know the city during camp, too. We can only practice and watch film for so many hours every day.”

This isn’t something Laura had considered. She’d prepared for development camp with nothing but hockey on her mind. Exploring a major city on top of that is exciting – and daunting.

“Any recommendations for where I should start?”

“Are you asking me to show you around?” Danny quips, and throws a cheeky smile over her shoulder. Though she’s sure Danny is just kidding around, Laura feels her cheeks flush. She grips the strap of her hockey bag a little tighter in her fist, until the knuckles go a little white.

“I – uh,” she says, very smoothly of course, in response.

Danny doesn’t let her suffer for long, and Laura is grateful for that.

“I’m kidding, rook,” she says. “There will be some team outings and stuff like that. And you’ll be rooming with an older player while you’re in camp. She can show you around, too. Coach thinks it makes the transition for the new rookies easier.”

“Does it?” Laura asks. Rooming with another rookie would at least afford her the comfort of knowing she and her roommate will be on equal footing. Rooming with a veteran is a more daunting prospect.

Danny shrugs. “None of your first camp is easy. But a good roommate can go a long way to making it more comfortable. I roomed with our captain last year, and I found it to be a nice thing.”

They’ve climbed most of the parking structure by this point. The cement structure radiates coolness, but Danny leads them back into the sun on the roof. Laura squints into the new light; the heat of the day washes over her again.

“So is that why you came to get me?” she asks next. “Are we rooming together for camp?”

She tries to keep the hope out of her voice, and knows she isn’t successful. Danny doesn’t make comment on that, instead giving her a sympathetic look as she shakes her head. It’s disappointing. Laura wants to know more about her new Amazonian teammate, who saved her from the terminal crowds and seems eager to make her feel welcome in the city. She’s also very cute, though it’s not generally good policy to let those thoughts fester when they’re about teammates. So Laura hides her disappointment behind a smile and a shrug.

“We’ll get to see each other at practice and stuff, too, anyway,” she says. “But if you’re not –”

“There you are, Xena,” another unfamiliar voice interrupts her question. Laura turns her head sharply to the left to find its source.

This woman is about Laura’s height, and she’s wearing the tightest pair of black leather pants Laura thinks she’s ever seen. They hug her thighs so well it’s almost indecent. Above them she wears a white cotton tee shirt. Its sleeves, rolled partially up her biceps, strain with the flex of her folded arms. Her hair falls in midnight waves just below her shoulders, and her eyes are obscured behind big aviator sunglasses. But her mouth is open in an impatient grin over her teeth. She makes no move to push off the door of the car she’s leaning on: a red Mustang convertible that looks about as dangerous as she does.

“Did you stop for ice cream along the way or something?” she asks, grinning wider.

“Give it a rest,” Danny says. Laura isn’t looking at her anymore, but she can hear the eye roll in Danny’s voice. There’s an unspoken but palpable tension between Danny and this new woman, and Laura wonders what the story is behind it.

“Are you on the team as well?” she asks.

The woman licks her lips once, slides her glasses down the bridge of her nose, and looks at Laura with dark eyes, the way she imagines a panther might look at a deer. Then she smiles wide enough for Laura to see her teeth. The smile is as inviting as it is unsettling.

“I’m Carmilla,” she says simply, then continues before Laura can take a breath to respond: “I’m your roommate, sweetheart."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "One day I'm gonna get the nerve and ask you for you number, but you just give me the lumber in overtime."  
> DOA; "Overtime"

_Laura Hollis stopped growing at the age of thirteen, when she topped out at a towering five feet, four inches tall. So when she told her high school coach she wanted to learn how to hit, he laughed in her face._

_She spent the next month with her nose stuck to the screen of her father’s tablet, watching highlights of professional defensemen: how they hit, how they created leverage without drawing charging penalties, and what situations they chose to take their biggest chances._

_Then, she enlisted her friends for help: she and Perry stuffed Lafontaine into an old set of hockey pads, and fortified that by duct taping blankets around their arms and middle. They strapped two helmets to their head, and snuck into the local rink after dark. Lafontaine let Laura knock them down until the sun started to creep in through the front doors, and the morning attendant came in to shoo them out, threatening to call the police if they were caught again._

_Two weeks later, when Laura flattened a girl twice her size with a hip check that cracked the glass along the boards, her coach stopped laughing and started teaching._

[July]

 

The stands are empty, a poppy playlist echoes loudly off the rafters, and Laura Hollis is doubled over along her defensive zone boards, trying to catch her fleeting breath before play resumes. Someone bumps the blade of her stick against Laura’s hip. She turns her head to see the culprit: Danny.

“Head up, rook,” she says, smiling. Laura straightens, and tries to breathe through her nose. Her head spins a little. At center ice, their coach stands with her arms crossed; her face is a regal knot of impatience.

They’re divided by position and then again in half: in each offensive zone, opposite each other along the boards, is a row of defensemen and, on the other side, a row of forwards. A black mass of pucks sits, patient, on either side of the neutral zone between them. The coach clears her throat loudly and waits a beat to make sure everyone is paying attention.

“Here’s the drill,” she begins. From her line’s position cattycorner to Laura and Danny’s, Carmilla snickers at the pun. The coach turns to glare at her and Laura could swear the rink gets ten degrees colder. Carmilla doesn’t meet her eyes, but neither does her wide grin fade from her face.

Laura, for her part, has no desire to antagonize their coach. She’s a tall, unapproachable woman who radiates wisdom and danger in equal measure. Far between and few are women who can remain imposing despite the swishing of a team tracksuit, but Matska Belmonde manages not only imposition but intimidation. She flicks her eyes to Laura, and the hairs on the back of Laura’s neck stand on end. The coach is smiling before her gaze leaves again, but there’s too much razor in the curve of her lips over her sparkling teeth for the gesture to soothe Laura’s unease.

“Here’s the drill,” she repeats. “One defenseman and one forward at a time, on each side. Defensemen, take a puck from the neutral zone, circle back to your defensive zone, and pass up to the forward at center ice. Then, remain in your defensive zone for a one-on-one with the forward receiving the pass from the other side. We’ll keep score. A goal is a point for the forwards, and a no-goal, a point for the defensemen.”

“What’s the prize?” and that’s Carmilla again. This time, her head is up and her eyes are flashing. Laura can see, even from across the rink, the excited lilt of her smile. Several of her fellow forwards turn to look at her, and Laura knows that hers is not the only gaze Carmilla is capable of holding.

“Keep it in your pants, Karnstein,” Danny shouts back. “It’s not like you’ll be winning anyway.”

Carmilla’s smile widens, and sharpens. Not for the first time, Laura gets the distinct impression that her development camp roommate might be a Panther in more than just uniform.

“I must have missed the hockey episode of Xena,” she taunts. Laura hears Danny huff behind her, but before she can fire back her own insult, their coach intervenes.

“Enough,” she says. Her voice seems to echo off the rafters, even over the thumping music. Danny is silent. Carmilla’s smile falters just the tiniest bit. “First team to ten wins, but you must win by at least two points. And the winner skips sprints at the end of practice.”

“What if no one wins?” Laura finds herself asking, before her nerves can overcome her exhaustion and stifle her curiosity.

“What’s that?” the coach asks, turning to face her fully. She arches an eyebrow, evaluative.

“If we get to ten, but we aren’t ahead by enough,” Laura clarifies. “What happens if no one wins?”

Coach waits a beat before responding, enough time for a song to end and for the silence to fill with the soft scrape of skate blades. The intro to the next song begins before she answers.

“Hockey games don’t end in ties, and neither will this drill.”

Something in the way she says it perks Laura up, her intuition triggered and waiting, like there’s some mystery before her. The coach doesn’t elaborate.

Carmilla does.

“I hope you’re ready to pump, Lawrence,” she shouts from across the rink. Danny does her best to flip her off despite the restriction of her glove.

Their coach glides across the rink to observe from the far corner, and says, “Begin.”

Laura digs her blades into the ice, and pushes off the boards to give herself a boost. She hooks a puck from the pile in front of her and twists her hips sharply as she enters the defensive zone, squaring her body toward the rest of the rink in front of her. She leans onto her back skate, letting the puck glide just in front of her stick blade, and then pushes forward to sling it into the neutral zone. It hits the waiting blade of the forward’s stick with a clap, and she surges into the offensive zone to engage the waiting defenseman there.

In front of Laura, Carmilla takes a pass of her own. She angles her hips square to Laura before she has the puck on her stick, so once it clacks against the blade, she’s already gaining speed. Laura leans on her inner edges, balancing herself to meet Carmilla’s advance, and finds that it’s been a mistake to slow herself in the process. Carmilla is fast, faster than Laura had seen in the team’s warmups. She needs only two strides to fly across the blue line, and Laura skates backwards in frantic paces to try to match her speed. Realizing that she won’t be able to make up that speed in time, Laura grits her teeth and braces hard against the ice behind her, forcing all of her weight forward.

If she can’t beat Carmilla to the net, she’ll make sure the forward doesn’t get there at all.

Sprinting forward while Carmilla speeds toward her closes the gap between them before Laura can take another breath. She only has a half-stride of steam built up before they meet, but Laura puts her whole body into a check that should bring her speedy roommate to a very swift halt.

A good body check uses all the best focal points for force on the human body: shoulder, upper arm, elbow, and hip hitting the other player with enough power to knock them either off the puck or to the ice. The easiest checks to perform are along the boards, where a defenseman can corral the opposing player between themselves and the sides of the rink and cut off any avenue of escape from the hit. Open-ice checks are more difficult. Building enough momentum to hit players effectively is not a subtle process, and without the barrier of the boards to assist in herding the target towards the check, it’s easy for alert players to avoid contact.

Carmilla proves very alert. While Laura lowers her shoulder to deliver her check, Carmilla spins to put her back to both her and the goal. She flicks the puck between her legs, and Laura, who has already committed her weight forward, can do little but watch it sail between her own skates as well. Carmilla completes her spin, Laura’s check catches nothing but air and the sleeve of Carmilla’s jersey, and Carmilla speeds off to collect the puck and flick it easily into the top corner of the net.

Laura stumbles out of her check attempt and wobbles to a stop around the blue line, cursing to herself under her breath. The forwards waiting in line clack their stick blades on the ice and cheer as Carmilla makes a loop behind the goal on her way back to the queue. Laura looks right at the scratchy skate lines in the ice on her own way back into line.

“Don’t feel too bad, rookie,” Carmilla shouts from across the rink. Laura looks up to find her grinning, her cheeks rosy with exertion. Laura scrunches up her face, angry at the flutters in her stomach at the sight. Her roommate is cute, but she’s also an ass. Her anger overcomes her attraction, rising like bile in her throat.

Laura counts the forwards and then the defensemen, shuffling up in line as she needs to, and surmises that she’ll get at least two more cracks at stopping Carmilla before either team amasses enough points to win. Then she clenches her teeth and grips her stick a bit tighter and tells herself in her head over and over, until she’s all but whispering the words aloud, that she’ll win two out of three and put her smug, speedy roommate in her place.

The next thing she registers is Danny shoving her towards the puck pile.

“Come on, rook, go,” she pants, and then doubles over, pressing her stick into her thighs and trying to catch her breath.

Laura stumbles from the push, but finds her balance again and swipes another puck from the pile. She tries to be simpler in her pass forward this time, not gliding quite so far toward the opposite side of the rink before she slings the puck across center ice to the forward awaiting it. Then she scrubs hard over the ice to get back to the center of the defensive zone.

She makes it back into position just as Carmilla crosses the blue line under a full head of steam. The difference between their movements is stark. Carmilla slices over the ice in long, quick strides that make it hard to tell where she plans on moving next. Laura, on the other hand, scrubs clumsily to her right and left, her skating jerky. She should force Carmilla to the boards, where her angle to the goal will be extreme and difficult to navigate. Instead, she wavers, allowing Carmilla too much room to maneuver.

Carmilla takes advantage of her hesitation. She turns her skates parallel to the goal line, showering the ice in front of her with snow and bringing herself to a stop. Laura pushes back hard on her own toes, but by the time she can lean forward to move towards Carmilla again, it’s too late. Carmilla jerks her stick behind her and brings it back down hard, slapping the puck toward the net. It pings off the crossbar and ricochets down into the goal.

The defensemen groan in unison in their lines along the boards. So much for taking two of three.

The defense is down now by three points, and the forwards only need a couple more goals to win the game. Laura’s lungs tighten in anticipation of the sprints they’ll have to do at the end of practice.

“What’s going on up there?” Danny says from behind her, while they wait in line for their next turn. She taps a gloved hand on top of Laura’s head. Not for the first time, Laura feels pleasantly small next to her. Danny shines a smile at her in between pants to catch her breath. This drill is a cardio-fest, sprints afterward or not.

“What do you mean?” Laura asks back. She hopes the heat in her cheeks isn’t burning through the color already there from the cold.

“She’s good, but she’s not that good,” Danny says. And maybe it’s that she has a year less experience than her fellow defenseman, but this is not convincing to Laura. She doesn’t speak her disbelief, but Danny addresses it anyway.

“Carmilla is quick and she’s crafty, but if you catch her, she won’t get away,” she says. “Don’t throw away what you’re good at just because it didn’t work right from jump.”

There isn’t time for Laura to respond: it’s her turn again, with the game – and the sprints – on the line. She pumps harder this time, churning her legs hard to build as much speed as possible before she hits the blue line with the puck. A twist of her hips has her squared to center ice, and half a beat later has the puck off her stick and sailing towards the forward at the opposite end of the neutral zone.

She’s done this faster than before. Carmilla is only just receiving her own pass when Laura slices back to the middle of the defensive zone. So she’s well into position when Carmilla takes the puck over the blue line at full speed. Laura glances up from the puck, only for a moment, and finds Carmilla staring back at her, the ghost of a grin on her lips and something hot and formidable in her gaze.

One-on-ones are rare during games. Usually, a defenseman can make do with forcing a forward to one side of the net or the other, helping her goaltender by forcing the forward to take a shot from as wide an angle as possible. With an empty net behind her, and no help flying to the rescue, there isn’t an option to diffuse Carmilla’s rush into a low-percentage shot and rely on her teammates.

So Laura relies on herself.

She waits first, for Carmilla to choose side, letting herself list backwards and keeping her hips low, so she can push off in whatever direction she needs. Carmilla nudges the puck to her left, but Laura watches how her weight stays on her right side. So she leans hard on her left skate, pushing to the right and staying with Carmilla when she drags the puck back over to her forehand. Carmilla makes a noise between a whine and a grunt, and she puts on another burst of speed, but Laura has remained in front of her, and she has nowhere to go.

They collide, briefly.

Laura tucks her elbows in out of habit – nothing worse than a good check ruined by an elbowing penalty – and stops as hard as she can on her edges. Carmilla seems to realize her mistake when Laura doesn’t move with the contact. She’s too close. There are a million ways now that Laura can take the puck from her, so Carmilla tries to finesse her way back to the middle of the zone. She saucers the puck behind Laura’s back, and leans hard on her left skate to try to follow it.

Forwards who are off-balance are easy forwards to topple.

Laura drops her shoulder into Carmilla’s chest and shoves as hard as she can. Carmilla grunts as the air is forced out of her lungs. Her chin snaps forward and clips Laura’s helmet. And then she’s on her ass, the puck skittering across the rink to thump harmlessly against the boards.

Carmilla rolls back to her feet, and slams the blade of her stick down onto the ice. She fixes Laura with a searing, angry gaze that the defenseman doesn’t see for having her back turned. The defensemen clack their own sticks on the ice as they stand in line, a hockey player’s applause. Laura retrieves Carmilla’s puck from the far boards, and flips it up into her hand.

She smiles at it for a small moment before returning it to the pile.

 

The defensemen still lose.

 

Laura slumps against their shared door and lets her hockey bag fall to the floor. The cool wood feels good against her forehead when she leans against it. She’s still overheated from practice, her face greasy with dried sweat. She huffs a quick breath in and out, working up the will to fish her keys out of her pocket. The key to her father’s house doesn’t fit in the lock. It takes her trying jam the wrong key into it half a dozen times before she curses under her breath and switches to the right one. The door swings open easily after that, revealing their dimly-lit room.

Carmilla is already lounging on the couch, awash in the flicker-glow of a black and white movie she isn’t paying attention to. She’s showered: her hair shiny and sticking to her bare shoulders. There’s a book open in her lap. She thumbs the bottom of her page impatiently, as though impatient with herself for not having finished reading it. When she finally does turn the page, and turns her gaze upward to the top of the next one, Laura catches her eye.

“Don’t get up on my account,” Laura huffs. “I only had to lug this crap –” she slings her bag against the base of the couch “—on the train the whole way here because  _someone_  didn’t wait around to give her roommate a ride home from the rink.”

Carmilla quirks an eyebrow upward during the rant, mouth open in silent amusement at the scene. Laura pants and seethes quietly when she’s done. Carmilla seems to know that. Her lips curve into a smile that stands the hairs up on the back of Laura’s neck. She swallows. Carmilla speaks.

“How could I know it was you?” she asks, flicking her eyes back to her book but keeping her smile in place. “For all I know it was some kind of psycho trying to break in with the wrong key.”

Laura kicks her bag, hard. Something in her foot crunches, but she ignores the pain.

“We live in a fucking condo complex owned by the fucking team we both  _fucking_  play for,” she shouts, punctuating each curse with another kick to her bag. By the end her chest and neck are stained with angry heat, and she’s pushing her breath through her teeth. Carmilla looks up from her book again. She wets her lips and smiles as she speaks.

“You can never be too careful, cupcake.”

Laura makes a sound somewhere between a shout and a groan. She gives her bag one last kick for good measure – and to stop from launching herself over the arm of the couch at her smug roommate. She stalks down the hall to her room then, with Carmilla’s soft laughter haunting her steps. Her skin crawls with rage. Laura has never been an especially angry person. Being a good defenseman is as much about knowing when not to react with aggression as it is unleashing that aggression on an opponent, and Laura is good at making that distinction because she’s slow to anger generally. Carmilla is under her skin, though. Laura mutters to herself as she digs in her dresser for a clean pair of underwear and a nightshirt.

Her anger fades a bit the longer she’s away from Carmilla in the living room. Clothes in hand and towel flung over her shoulder, she closes herself off in their shared bathroom and turns on the tub’s faucet. Steam quickly fills the small space. Laura pulls the pin to turn on the shower before shucking out of her clothes. Anticipation of the hot shower lifts the rest of the anger out of her chest; it dissipates into the steam with the long breath she sighs out once she’s under the showerhead.

Laura stands there facing away from the tap, letting the water pelt her back, until the setbacks in practice and the strife with Carmilla don’t make her skull buzz with anxiety. Only then, when she can start to feel the usual fatigue that follows a hard practice begin to pull her eyelids downward, does she wash herself quickly.

When Laura finally exits the bathroom, clad in a pair of athletic shorts and a tank top, Carmilla is still in the living room. Laura can just make out her face in the grayscale light of the TV, though it’s hard to tell if she’s still awake or not. Her chin rests on her chest, rising and falling with her breathing. Laura pauses at her bedroom door.

If it was Laura out there, she’d rather be woken now than have a cramped back in the morning from a night on the couch. So she looks into her darkened room, but only to thrown her dirty clothes into her hamper just inside the door. Then she pads back down the hall to the living room.

Carmilla must indeed be asleep, because she doesn’t stir as Laura approaches. The movie she had been watching is over, the chapter selection screen of the DVD offering stagnant grey light by which Laura can make out Carmilla on the couch. Her eyes are closed, her book open but laid face down on her lap. She swallows in her sleep as Laura approaches. Her jaw flexes when her throat moves, its line sharpened by the glow from the TV.

Laura shakes her head, drags her eyes up to Carmilla’s closed lids, and reaches out to shake her shoulder gently.

“Hey, Carmilla?” she says. Her roommate doesn’t stir. “Carm?”

Carmilla tenses before she opens her eyes. Laura feels the muscles in her shoulder go taut, her bicep flexing beneath it. She pulls her hand away, worried she’s frightened Carmilla out of a nightmare. When Carmilla does open her eyes, she does so slowly first. She seems to get her bearings for half a beat, and then cranes her neck to look up at Laura.

Her eyes are big and brown, and warm with sleep. Laura swallows, alone there in the dark with her.

“What do you want, cupcake?” Carmilla asks. Her voice is a gravely whisper, rough with sleep. Laura leans towards her without realizing it.

“Uh,” Laura begins. Carmilla raises her eyebrows at her stammer. “I, um. Sleeping on the couch can’t be as comfortable as your bed, so I figured –”

Carmilla cuts her off with a laugh in the back of her throat, short and unkind. It snaps the spell of the moment just before, and something hot flares in Laura’s chest again.

“I’m just trying to be nice,” she says. Carmilla scoffs again.

“Waking me from a good dream is nice?” she asks. She sits up, swinging her feet to the floor and rubbing at the back of her neck. When she finds the spot that’s ailing her, she digs at it with her fingertips, sighing. The sound gives Laura the shivers, which is annoying when she’s trying to be indignant.

“Keeping that from happening to the rest of your spine is nice,” Laura says. She leans away from the couch and crosses her arms.

Carmilla looks up at her, smiling. It’s a ghost of her grin on the ice: all feeling but no razor, open. Laura wonders if she’s really awake, or if the softness of waking sleep has tempered the look.

“Well aren’t you just a peach,” Carmilla says. She pushes up on her knees to stand, and claps Laura on the shoulder as she brushes by her towards the hallway. Even half asleep she’s strong; Laura rocks back onto her heels and grips the back of the couch to keep her balance.

She thinks she hears Carmilla chuckle from the darkened hallway before she closes her door behind her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You knew it was slow burn when you clicked into this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update comes after a very long delay, as I'm very sure I don't have to tell you. I'm sorry for it. My life has seen several very important milestones recently, and while that's not an excuse for abandoning my projects, it is an explanation of sorts.
> 
> If you're still there, thank you for sticking around. Hopefully this has been worth the wait.

_In the early Fall of her senior year, Laura and her father sat at the kitchen table, across from a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit. Her school was the only one to have sent an emissary to court Laura into a commitment. She was an assistant coach. The school was looking for toughness, she said. They needed someone to look after their crop of small, speedy forwards._

_If Laura was willing to bloody her knuckles and otherwise stay out of the way, she’d have a spot on the team and a partial scholarship waiting for her._

_Her father didn’t approve, but Laura Hollis would finish a thousand fights and sit for a thousand major penalties to keep playing hockey for just a few more years._

 

Carmilla slashes towards the boards, hard. Laura can see the angle of her hips, though. She eases up on her edges to follow, skating backwards, her stick held out to her right in anticipation of Carmilla’s deke back towards the center of the zone.

“Stick her, Hollis!” their captain yells from the neutral zone boards.

“Nah, fucking smoke her, Carm!” a forward yells beside her. In the corner of her eye, Laura catches Mel shove the offending forward, smiling. She encourages this kind of intra-team rivalry.

And she expects her defensemen to win it.

Carmilla does deke back to the other side, and even though Laura is anticipating it, Carmilla is much quicker than she is. She’s too quick, in this case. Laura tries to swipe her stick around to poke check, but by the time she’s through the movement, Carmilla is almost past her towards the goal. Laura’s stick catches the tops of Carmilla’s skates, slashing the forward to her knees. The puck skitters slowly towards the goal, where the goalie sticks it aside.

“Shit,” Laura curses under her breath.

It’s a bad mistake. She should have taken advantage of Carmilla’s loose handle on the puck, and shoulder or hip checked her as she came around to meet it on Laura’s right side. Instead, Laura committed what would have been a tripping penalty. And power plays are a lot more likely to result in opposition goals than letting her goalie do her job.

“What the frilly hell was that?” Carmilla shouts, back on her feet now. Laura looks at her, sees the anger roll off her shoulders, her teeth bared.

“An accident,” Laura says. It’s unconvincing, and Carmilla is incensed.

“It’s sloppy stick control,” their coach chimes in from her place at the blue line. Laura can’t look away from Carmilla, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. An enforcer knows when a fight is brewing. But then, Matske again, louder, unyielding: “Back in line, both of you.”

Carmilla acquiesces, glowering still as she slides backwards towards the far boards. She doesn’t look away from Laura before Laura takes her place in line with the other defensemen, and the string of players along the boards breaks their line of sight to each other.

“You’re gonna get your ass kicked, pulling shit like that with her,” Danny says, nudging Laura’s shoulder to get her attention.

“Yeah,” Laura says. Her voice sounds far away to her. It was a stupid mistake. And she won’t dwell on it. So she quips instead: “And she knows where I sleep.”

Danny laughs. Laura likes the sound: rich like good milk chocolate. It buoys her mood a bit.

“I’ll get her good next time, and no tripping,” she says.

Another skater nudges between her and Danny in line: their captain. Laura looks up at her impassive face, and waits for more admonishment. It doesn’t come.

“Keep the butt of your stick closer to your left armpit next time,” she says instead. “And when she tries to cut around you, dig your toes in and cross-check her hard. No ref is going to catch it if you’re already tangled up because she’s trying to muscle by you.”

She winks, a cheeky grin blossoming on her face, and slips back to her original place in line. Laura looks blinkingly after her. Her captains in college had been student-government level verbal leaders and coach’s pets. They’d have yelled at her for effect after a trip on the team’s best forward in practice, preferably where the coach could overhear them displaying their leadership abilities. Clearly Mel had a different philosophy.

Danny chuckles darkly behind her. “Just don’t take anyone’s head off, rookie.”

 

July turns to August, and camp starts to drag on for everyone. The older players are eager to be out of camp and onto the preseason. The younger players, their numbers dwindling as cuts begin and minor league contracts are doled out, grow increasingly tired as the weeks pass and the pace of practice and play does not relent.

Laura is no exception. She finds herself exhausted constantly: between the early conditioning sessions, skills practices, and team scrimmages, by the time the afternoon rolls around she finds it hard to keep her eyes open in the dark video room. More than once she slumps against Danny's shoulder on the couches there, and has to be jostled awake. Danny gives her a sympathetic look each time.

"I remember how much of a whirlwind this can be," she says when Laura gives her bleary-eyed thanks.

Her crush on Danny has not abated, and that makes these film-room naps all the more embarrassing. It’s one thing to be so tired she’s fighting unconsciousness for two thirds of her day. It’s quite another to wake up half in the arms of the girl she likes and can never have. She starts drinking coffee before the sessions midway through the month, bringing her mug with her to the film room and taking small sips between video clips to stay awake. It keeps her from falling asleep on Danny, but it also keeps her from sleeping well at night.

She knows she is not doing well. The pace of practice and play at this level is another world from her college experience, and she doesn’t have the time with the demanding schedule – let alone the energy – to fit in extra conditioning practice to catch up to everyone else. The training room becomes her second home after practices, where she spends hours icing and stretching, trying to force recovery into her aching muscles.

It doesn’t help that she’s not receiving anything in the way of mentorship from Carmilla. Danny is willing to be supportive, but she has her own young defenseman to mentor, and she’s only in her second year of play herself. What with that and her schoolgirl crush, she starts seeing less and less of Danny on purpose. Avoiding her after practice solves the two problems at once, but it also makes for a very lonely camp.

As the weeks go on, full contact scrimmages become more frequent. The goal is to acclimate the new players in camp to the demanding pro schedule, but in practice, the three-on-three format is a natural hunting ground for Laura’s speedy roommate to make her look silly. As a defense-first blue-liner, Laura’s job is to make sure there’s always a defenseman between any streaking forwards and her goalie. More often than not, that finds Laura frantically scrubbing backwards while Carmilla gains enough speed to deke her out of her skates.

Carmilla isn’t fighting for a spot on the team, but Laura failing to stop more than one in five rushes isn’t helping her chances of remaining in Toronto for her rookie season.

When she’s not embarrassing her on the ice, however, Carmilla becomes a ghost. After finding her on the couch that night, Laura hasn't seen her relax in more than a month. She's never in her room - at least not alone. Girls love goals, Danny says, her voice tight, when Laura hedges a question about the parade of guests that tromps in and out of their living space during the week. But on weekends her roommate is a fixture: reading at their kitchen table or the small balcony that overlooks the city, and blaring rock music while she does, until the late afternoon when she dresses in sinfully tight leather and tromps out to paint the town.

She never comes home alone.

Laura spends most of her weekends trying to let her body heal from the week's abuse. Normally an early riser, she sleeps until the late morning on Saturdays, only to hobble to the bathroom for a shower hot enough to burn her soreness away. She eats three pain pills with her eggs for breakfast, and sits at the kitchen table until they kick in and her legs don't shake when she stands. By that time, Carmilla has usually awoken. She doesn't comment on Laura's evident distress - in fact they hardly speak to each other at all. Instead she opens her book and reads, silent except for the small sips she takes of a glass of orange juice.

In the middle of the month, on a particularly sunny morning, Laura ventures to ask Carmilla how her night had been.

“Fair,” is Carmilla’s response, her gaze never leaving the book in her hand. But she grins as she continues: “Though, brunette below the waist.”

“Cheese and crackers, Carmilla, really?” Laura says, dropping her fork to the table. Carmilla shrugs, still not looking up from her book.

“You asked,” she points out.

“I was _referring_ to whether you might have done anything fun, you know, an activity or person you’d enjoyed?”

Carmilla fails to stifle a laugh. Laura isn’t sure what she imagined Carmilla’s laugh would sound like, but the gravely, sweet sound she hears certainly wouldn’t have been her first guess. She also can’t remember another time she’s pulled a laugh from Carmilla that wasn’t just a loud scoff. The sound does something wobbly to her gut. Carmilla puts an end to that quickly, though.

“Cupcake, that question isn’t much better if you’re not looking for a dirty answer,” she says.

Laura goes a bit red, and pouts: “You’re impossible.”

Carmilla’s smile wanes, hollows out to the half-bored twist of lips Laura knows best. The change is fast and jarring, like she’s deked Laura right out of her skates for the millionth time. Laura opens her mouth, not quite sure what she’s going to say once her tongue gets its act together.

Her phone saves her, blaring an alarm she’d set the night before. She hastily shuts it off.

“I’ve gotta, um,” she pauses long enough for Carmilla to arch one delicate eyebrow at her. “I’ve gotta go. Um.”

“Don’t let me stop you, sweetheart,” Carmilla says. But she doesn’t look away from Laura’s face. Laura is the one who has to turn away, getting up from the table and brushing past Carmilla toward their bedrooms. Carmilla watches from over her shoulder as Laura retreats. It’s not until Laura has disappeared into her room that the forward shakes her head and returns her attention to the book in her hands.

In her room, Laura takes a moment to collect her thoughts before going about getting ready. She’s being silly, she reasons silently. She and Carmilla have eaten breakfast together every day for the last six weeks. There’s no reason to be flustered over her stupid brown eyes and her dumb, sexy laugh, and –

“You okay there buttercup?”

Laura’s feet leave the floor when she startles. She whips her neck around to glare at Carmilla, who leans against the frame of her door, orange juice in hand and smirking. Her bicep flexes with the strain of keeping her propped against the door, and Laura stares for probably too long at the way it slopes to meet her shoulder.

“What do you want, Carmilla?” she says, harsher than she probably needs to be, she thinks. Carmilla’s eyebrows lift. Laura can’t tell if she’s impressed or just amused.

“You were standing so still, I couldn’t tell if you were having some kind of silent fit or just practicing your on-puck defense.”

Laura huffs out a breath. It’s like being back at the café with Betty all over again, only this time she gives a crap about her job. And about losing it.

“Woah, don’t go postal on me,” Carmilla says then. Laura glances at her again, but Carmilla isn’t looking at her face. She’s looking at her hands, which are currently ripping the bottom hem of the shirt Laura had picked to wear.

“At least let me get you a phonebook, she-hulk,” Carmilla laughs.

“You’re impossible,” Laura says, quieter than her outburst before. Carmilla’s smile slips from her face. They look at each other for another moment before Carmilla shrugs and walks back to the kitchen table.

Laura looks after her, pensive. They don’t know how to talk to each other, that much is abundantly clear. Laura can’t tell if Carmilla just doesn’t like her, or if she’s trying to connect and they’re just too different to mesh. Laura doesn’t like conflict, and least of all does she like the sort of passive aggressive conflict that she can’t solve by being direct and open. She clenches the shirt in her hands again, listening to the strain of the fabric.

Hockey arguments are so much easier to solve.

She also doesn’t have time for this. Throwing the ruined shirt in her hands to the ground, she instead grabs a tank top from her top drawer and pulls it on. She brushes her teeth, not quite for two minutes. But then, she’s already flying by the seat of her pants professionally, so she might as well do so dentally, too. She waves a quick goodbye to her roommate before she leaves, hastily closing the door behind her without bothering to lock it.

Carmilla watches the door close behind Laura as she leaves. When the bolt clicks home in the jamb, and the room is sealed from the muffled noise in the hall again, she fidgets. It’s a small thing: a squirm of her hips in her chair. She glances at her book again, but the words don’t catch her gaze. That’s annoying.

She only chews on the inside of her cheek for a few seconds. As soon as the book had no longer sufficed to hold her interest, Carmilla knew what she was going to do. And so she does it: rises from her place at the table (orange juice of course left out and forgotten), and stalks back to her bedroom to dress.

 

When Laura arrives at the rink, she finds herself alone. It’s an eerie feeling, a hockey stadium devoid of people. Her footsteps echo off the walls of empty hallways, her shadow spinning around her as she walks beneath fluorescent light after grainy, fluorescent light. Everything is on display at the rink: the player hallways brightly-lit, the locker rooms flush with the same white light. And of course the rink itself: spotlighted and shining, from the glow of the ice in the ceiling lights to the pulsing LEDs in the overhead scoreboard. There’s such a rush of noise and activity during game days and scheduled practices that it’s normally easy to tune out, or build off of. The silence that reigns on an off day, however, compresses the air and becomes impossible to ignore.

Laura heads to the locker rooms, ducking inside quickly and burying her head and torso in her locker space as quickly as she can. She still feels out of place here, like she’s some visitor at a camp instead of a professional trying to make a pro squad. She tries to push those thoughts away as she pulls on her pads and laces up her skates. They stick, though, until she hears the locker room door swing open again, revealing a very disheveled-looking Danny Lawrence, still in her sweatpants and yawning.

“Late night?” Laura jokes. She can feel her chest buoying already in Danny’s presence.

Danny waves a hand in her direction, still yawning, and slouches over to her locker across the room. Laura trills a laugh at her slothful appearance.

“You gonna be okay to go today?” she asks, returning her attention to her laces.

She hears Danny cough, twice, and then the sound turns into a laugh.

“I’m good to go,” she says, turning herself. That familiar, soft confidence is back in her face now, and Laura almost startles at the difference. She hides her surprise with a smile as best she can. It’s still easy to smile when Danny’s around.

They walk together to the practice rink with Laura taking two steps to every one of Danny’s to keep up. She can’t bring herself to be annoyed at the extra work for her tired legs. Being around Danny makes her feel light, like she could run a marathon while floating several inches off the ground. But even Danny has to bring her back down to earth today.

“I wanted to run you through your odd man rush defense.”

Laura can’t help the groan the leaves her mouth. Danny isn’t as fast or as crafty as Carmilla, but she’s still an offensive powerhouse, especially when she’s crossing the blue line with a six-foot head of steam.

“Relax rook,” Danny laughs, holding the rink door open for Laura to walk through. “You wanna make the team? You better get comfortable with the odd rush.”

Laura holds the bench gate open for Danny in turn.

“No, I know,” she says. “I’m just…”

She trails off, stepping onto the ice after Danny. Her blades hit the smooth surface and she takes a few scrubbing steps to pick up some speed.

“I’ve never been asked to do anything but fight,” she continues. “Maybe throw a check or two when the situation presents itself. I’ve never really been asked to take on a team’s best skater for more than a shift or two. And now everyone is the other team’s best skater, because everyone is the best skater. And I’ve…”

She stops. She’s never been the best skater. She says so, and that makes Danny, who’d previously busied herself setting up a net blocker, turn to face her again. Laura is intently studying her laces, and twirling her stick nervously in her hands.

“It’s really not that complicated,” she says. Her voice is light, like sunshine. Too light. It’s too light for the pressing anxiety in Laura’s chest. Laura grimaces before she looks up at the sun.

“Let’s just get to this,” she says. She pushes off in Danny’s direction, setting her mouth in a determined scowl and charging, as she always does, headlong into her task.

 

Carmilla pulls her hair up on the way to her car. She drops the soft top so she can vault into the driver’s seat and speed out of the condo’s lot. Going after the rookie is a thrill, and those are rare during training camp. She hasn’t had to fight for a spot on a team since her peewee days, so these training camps are really a chance for her to get the rust out of her legs and spend a few weeks prowling the hot summer nights in downtown Toronto. She grabs her aviators from the cup holder, flipping them on for the short drive to the rink.

She has some time to kill with annoying the rookie before another night begins.

She takes the short route to the rink, parking in the player’s lot and not bothering to fold the top back up after she jumps back over the door and onto the pavement. The guard at the player’s entrance buzzes her in before she finishes her trot to the door, and she slips in with a nod in his direction.

And she doesn’t slow from there. Carmilla shrugs out of her jacket before she’s in the locker room, and quickly undresses on her way to her locker, strewing her clothes behind her on the floor of the wide space: her white tee shirt on the Panther’s logo in the center, her boots like two breadcrumbs after that. She hops the rest of the way to her locker, trying to get out of her jeans.

She’s out the door again before she even pulls her sweater on over her pads.

 

“Shit balls!” Laura slams her stick into the ice, watching from the middle of the defensive zone as Danny flips another puck up and over the net blocker.

“I’m coming right at you,” Danny says, pity on her face that makes Laura’s stomach turn.

“I know, I know, it’s just,” Laura can’t even finish her thought. Her legs are like jelly. She’s still not in good enough shape to handle her regular work, and this extra practice is taking its toll. It doesn’t help that she can’t stop Danny any easier than she can Carmilla.

She thinks of home, then, and her father. How proud he was the day she left home. And how she’ll be sent down to the affiliate in Montreal in just a few weeks, and dash his hopes of seeing her in a Panther uniform.

“Shit,” she curses again. She takes her place at the blue line again and gestures to the pile of pucks at center ice. “Again, come on.”

“Look, Laura,” and she hates the way Danny’s voice wraps around her name now, so full of the sort of gentleness normally reserved for a child. “We can call it a day, there’s no reason we can’t come back next week and keep trying. You don’t have to conquer the world in a single day.”

“It hasn’t been a single day,” Laura says, not making eye contact as Danny skates by her. “Just once more, please.”

“Okay, rook,” Danny says. Laura can tell she’s just humoring her now. She doesn’t care. She bends her knees and slices little wobbles into the ice beneath her, readying herself for Danny’s attack.

Danny is tall, and it takes her several long strides to get going. When she does, she’s a freight train bearing down on the blue line and far too big to stop. She’s big enough to body by Laura, but that’s not the point of this exercise. She’s less direct than she could be, and Laura helps her out, rushing up to meet her just inside the blue line and shunting her to the boards, creating a harsh angle for any shot she might want to take. Danny does her best to mimic Carmilla’s signature move along the boards: a quick deke to the board side, then a quicker, jarring stop and swipe of the puck across her body and back towards the middle of the zone.

Laura is, at least, better at diagnosing the move now. When Danny dekes across her body, Laura sees the opening to crosscheck her. Part of her wants to take it. Mel had been right in her advice earlier: it’d be a quick, hidden check that would make any forward second guess her decision to leave her body so open again.

She lets it pass, going for another poke check. Danny muscles by her, and scores again. Laura curses, again. She keeps her stick aloft, at least, half afraid it’ll snap if she slams it onto the ice again. Instead she spins a little circle in the ice. Her legs are still wobbly, and the extra centrifugal force from the spin throws off her balance, sending her down to one knee. She yelps in surprise when her leg gives way, and hears the beginning of the laugh that Danny can’t quite keep from escaping. Laura feels her cheeks burn when she discerns another laugh, from the opposite and decidedly not in Danny’s voice.

She turns, red-faced, to watch Carmilla climb over the boards and glide over to where she and Danny have set up shop, helmet in hand and stick crutched under one arm. Carmilla is still chuckling as she comes to a halt just outside the blue line. Danny scoffs behind Laura, the air between her and Carmilla already thick with dislike.

“You oughta just take cap’s advice and cross-check her next time,” Carmilla says, smiling wider than Laura’s ever seen her. Anger curls in Laura’s chest, cold and grasping. It’s bad enough that Carmilla makes her look like a fool every time they face each other. She doesn’t need the pointers, too.

“Not everyone wants to cheapen the game with cheap shots,” Danny responds for her. Her voice is low, and angry. The cold in Laura’s chest dissipates, like a crack in lake ice on a spring morning. There’s a fight brewing, and she never goes into a fight angry.

“Don’t talk to me about cheapening the game,” Carmilla fires back. “Not everyone is blind to your Ben Johnson routine.”

“You want to go there, Karnstein, we can go there,” Danny yells. She’s already thrown her stick to the ice, and is ripping off her gloves by the time Laura gets to her. She grabs fast hold of Danny’s wrists. Danny struggles, and finds with wide-eyed surprise that she can’t break Laura’s grip.

“Let go, Hollis,” she says. Her voice is even lower than before, meant for only Laura to hear. But with as firm a hold as she has, Laura safely ignores the implied threat. Instead, she turns to stare daggers at Carmilla, squaring her shoulders while holding a still-squirming and very much still towering Danny Lawrence.

Carmilla’s eyebrows lift, just as they had that morning in Laura’s bedroom. New, gentle heat blossoms in Laura’s throat, threatening to burn up into her cheeks, as she realizes that Carmilla _had_ been impressed. _Is_ impressed. She pushes that aside, keeping her face neutral and her jaw set.

“What in hell and Hogwarts is going on with you two,” she asks. Danny gives a particularly vicious tug to free her hands, and Laura lets her go, satisfied that she’ll not try rushing their teammate absent the physical restraint.

“You’re constantly bickering and you’re at each other’s throats over nothing,” she continues. Danny huffs again behind her, but Laura ignores her. She raises her voice, her eyes never leaving Carmilla’s.

“You want to tell me what’s so damn rotten between you that you can’t be on the same rink together without trying to kill each other?”

“You have no idea what you’re asking for,” Carmilla says. She doesn’t elaborate. That makes Laura angry.

She swallows the bile rising in her throat before she opens her mouth, “Enlighten me, then.”

Carmilla looks from Laura’s face to Danny’s very quickly. Then she shakes her head.

“This was a mistake,” she says. And then she turns, back towards the bench, leaving a very annoyed, very pent up Laura Hollis behind her.

Her legs are like jelly. Danny is behind her, already picking up her stick, and Laura knows only the stubborn, singular need to stop Carmilla from leaving and ignoring her question. She pumps hard, both hands on her stick, to catch Carmilla before she can reach the bench gate and leave the rink.

“Hey!” Laura yells, catching Carmilla’s elbow and spinning her around. It’s Carmilla’s turn to yelp her surprise, though she keeps her feet.

“What?” Carmilla yells back. “What do you want, you lunatic?”

“What is going on?” Laura asks again.

Danny slips behind them and leaves the rink. Laura hardly notices. She and Carmilla are an inch and a half from touching noses. She can smell the lavender in her hair, still uncovered by the helmet she never had the chance to put on. Something not quite anger shines in her dark eyes.

“Just drop it, cupcake,” she says. It’s as much a plea as it is a command, and Laura feels a tug to obey, or acquiesce. She isn’t sure. But she ignores the impulse.

“I’m not exactly the type to let things go,” she says. “I just want to help. What could be so terrible?”

Carmilla’s face hardens. Her jaw snaps shut and her lips press into a thin, angry line. Laura watches her jaw flex and knows Carmilla is clenching her teeth. When Carmilla speaks, it’s in a hiss.

“You’re a child,” she says, all but snarling and dangerous. “And you understand nothing.”

She steps closer to Laura, making the most of their small height difference. Laura looks up at her, defiant.

“Drop. It.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Laura says, and she could swear Carmilla growls in response. They’re so close now, Laura can almost feel the heat rolling off of her there in the cold.

“Why not,” Carmilla demands to know.

“Because this isn’t hockey,” Laura says. Carmilla scoffs, but she continues unabated: “Because this team deserves better than being at each other’s throats. Danny deserves better. I deserve better. Hell, even you deserve better.”

Carmilla blanches. She exhales sharply through her nose, pursing her lips. But her eyes are shining. Laura swallows, her eyes flitting between them and Carmilla’s lips. She wets her own with her tongue.

Carmilla opens her mouth to speak –

“Hollis.”

They turn together, facing the new voice still chest to chest. Their coach comes into view from the darkened hallway behind the bench.

“Coach,” Carmilla and Laura say together. They glance at each other, and for a moment, Laura thinks she sees a smile on Carmilla’s face. It’s gone by the time they both look back.

“With me, Hollis, if you please.”

Laura looks at Carmilla again, but her roommate is staring blankly at their coach. Laura can’t tell if she’s thinking, or just bored again. But she slips by her and follows Matska back into the breezeway.

“Is there a problem, coach?” she asks.

“No,” Matska says.

When she doesn’t elaborate, Laura falls silently in line behind her. The walk together passed the locker rooms, along the rubber-floored hallway to the coach’s office. Matska’s heels make no sound on the spongey floor, and Laura’s blades sink soundlessly in and out of the surface as well.

“In,” Matska says simply, when they’re at her door. “Sit.”

Laura does, trying to get comfortable in the fancy chair with her pads still on. She slots her stick between her legs and peels off her gloves. And she waits.

Matska sits opposite her, behind an ornate desk of dark wood. It’s far too ornate for a hockey coach, Laura thinks. But then, she went to a small school with a small budget. Her former coach’s desk was thus simply small. Even in her bulky equipment, Laura feels small right now, too.

“The GM and I have just spoken with your agent,” the coach says. Laura swallows a hard bit of saliva. Her throat doesn’t seem to be working properly.

“The team has decided to sell your contract to our minor affiliate in Montreal.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All I have to say is that if you've ever known two lesbians who are starting to like each other, what's going to happen next won't surprise you at all.

Matska pauses after her reveal. Laura thinks she’s waiting for a response, but words are suddenly difficult for her. She touches the handle of her stick, staring blankly at the tape around the knob. After several silent moments go by, Matska sighs to regain Laura’s attention.

“Call your agent,” she says. “They’ll have the details on your new contract and your travel details.”

“Okay,” Laura says. That should be easy. “Okay, thank you.”

She doesn’t know why she’s thanking the woman who’s just delivered the news that her dreams have been shattered, but she does it anyway. Later she’ll find time to be embarrassed about that. For now, she shakes Matska’s hand, and lets her lead them both back to her door.

When coach opens the door, Carmilla is there.

Laura startles back to her senses, almost knocking into her roommate. Carmilla is still in her pads, too, and though she didn’t actually partake in any drills earlier, the hair at her temples is shiny, and stuck to her skin with sweat. Her jaw is still clenched. Laura looks up at her face, but Carmilla isn’t looking at her.

She’s looking at their coach, with a pinched expression that seems to be anger and doubt at once. Her brow is furrowed, but her eyes are wide. Carmilla doesn’t seem to even notice Laura is there, even when she siddles to the side of her to leave the room.

“Can I help you with something, Carmilla?” Matska sounds amused, drawing out the soft consonants in her words. Laura looks back, from a few steps into the hallway, and sees her smiling. She can see Carmilla’s jaw still set, pulling at the tendons in her neck.

“Can we talk?” Carmilla asks her. She glances very quickly behind her, where Laura waits, and then returns her gaze to their coach. “In private?”

Matska follows her line of sight to Laura and back, her smile faltering just enough for Laura to notice. Her intuition flares again. Something is weird with this team. Everyone’s always on edge, but instead of yelling, or fighting, or hitting each other a few times in practice like normal hockey players, they bottle everything up. They make sure no one outside the circle knows what’s happening within it.

It’s annoying as hell. Laura doesn’t like secrets, least of all when they affect the things she cares about. She watches Matska allow Carmilla into her office, and give Laura one last glance before she shuts her door behind her. And then Laura Hollis turns her back on that office, and stalks back to the locker room.

Those secrets won’t stay secret for long.

 

She texts her dad on the second day after receiving the news of her demotion. He calls her immediately, barking into the phone in his standard form of comfort. And normally she would meet that energy. They’re more alike, she and her father, than she would readily admit: very direct, unsatisfied with pleasantries, and utterly uninterested in anything but the raw truth of things. It makes him overprotective.

It makes Laura too independent for her own good.

They talk twice more before she’s set to leave for her new city. He promises to visit when he can get the time off work, and to come to her games when the team travels to the Toronto area to play. It’s really not so different from being in college, Laura reasons to herself, as she lets her father prattle on about road trips with Perry and whether he can ship a jersey directly to LaFontaine or if he’ll need to send it to the university in Austria to give to them.

But the day before the preseason is about to begin, she receives a call from her agent: plans have changed, and she’ll be remaining in Toronto through the first game of the preseason. When Laura asks him the reason for the delay, he doesn’t have an answer. She gets the distinct impression that he never asked for one. Laura isn’t exactly his most important or prestigious client, and he’s probably just happy to be getting a cut of her much larger league salary for a few more days. Her pay will be cut by two thirds when she goes to Montreal, after all.

She takes the call on the balcony of their condo. When she walks back in, Carmilla is in her usual place at their kitchen table, glass of orange juice in front of her and a thick book in her hands. She doesn’t look up from it when Laura closes the sliding glass door behind her.

“Good call?” she asks. Laura clicks into her phone to check the time. Carmilla is up far earlier than usual, by her estimation.

“You could say that,” Laura says. She turns her phone a few times in her hand. “I’m not leaving until tomorrow.”

“Oh?”

The simple response makes Laura suspicious. She stares at the back of Carmilla’s head as it turns with her reading from one page to the next. Carmilla hasn’t exactly been a good host, and she certainly doesn’t make polite trills to encourage conversation.

“What did you want to talk with coach about, the other day at the rink?” Laura asks.

Carmilla’s head stops moving. Her elbows dig into the table a little harder than before, the old legs groaning very softly under more of her weight. But as soon as she stills, she starts moving again. Laura isn’t fooled, either by her attempt to hide her discomfort or by what she says next.

“No idea what you’re on about, creampuff. I just had some questions about the game tomorrow.”

“You’re so full of it,” Laura says, not unkindly. Carmilla turns to smile at her, doe-eyed with faux innocence. Laura feels a grin of her own creep into her jaw. She shakes her head to lodge it loose.

“Was it about whatever’s going on between you and Danny?” she asks.

Carmilla’s smile falters, and her eyes narrow a bit. She turns in her chair to face Laura more fully.

“You’re not going to like what you find,” she says, warning but coy. Laura can’t tell if she’s trying to warn her off, or subtly egging her on. Not that it matters.

Before Laura can respond, though, both their phones buzz: Laura’s in her hand and Carmilla’s on the kitchen table behind her. Laura clicks her screen to life, swiping into the message. It’s a series of numbers and dashes, in four rows of three. Then, as quickly as she can scan that, another message flashes through: more numbers and dashes, this time in three pairs.

In almost all sports, most of the players who start a game will also finish it. In baseball, soccer, and football, personnel changes are rare, happening mostly following injury or only for specific positions and situations. Even in basketball, substitutions happen only when play stops, allowing everyone time reorient themselves under new lineups.

Hockey is very different. Teams organize themselves into four lines of three forwards each, and three pairings of defensemen. Each of which is its own unit that always comes and goes from the field of play together. And although lines can be changed at most stoppages of play, they are for the most part rotated on the fly, players climbing the short boards lining the benches and jumping from the rink gates to fly into play as quickly as possible. Aside from the goalie, who stays in net for the entirety of the game unless pulled for performance, injury, or to grant the team an extra skater, players take their ice time in shifts ranging from fifteen to sixty seconds. And for the most part, the best skaters populate the first lines and pairings, starting most games and playing the most key rotations.

“First pairing, huh?” Carmilla says. Whether she’s impressed or just teasing, Laura doesn’t care. Because she _is_ in the first pairing, her number three just a dash away from Mel’s nineteen.

“I didn’t think I’d be playing,” Laura says, squinting at her screen as though the change in focus will also change the numbers. “I thought I was just here until they could file my paperwork and book a cheap flight.”

Carmilla rises silently from her seat at the kitchen table and walks over to where Laura still stands. She stops close, and dips her head as she speaks to catch Laura’s eye.

“And now you’re with me,” she says. It’s like a flashback to their conversation on the ice earlier in the week. Carmilla searches her face with probing eyes the longer Laura stares without speaking, the smile on her face so soft that Laura isn’t sure if it’s there at all.

“Yeah,” Laura says finally. Carmilla seems to suck the heat from the room, concentrating it in the small space between them. Laura wants to shiver. She flexes as many muscles as she can remember she has to keep herself still. “Guess I am.”

She raises her chin, finally looking Carmilla in the eyes. Her roommate smiles wide once they’re looking at each other properly, a laugh bubbling behind her teeth that Laura can hear even before she opens her mouth to let it out. And she’s embarrassed to find herself proud of eliciting the sound.

“It’s only a hockey game, you know,” Carmilla laughs. Her grin remains as she continues, and Laura knows her well enough by now that she has an idea what’s coming: “Though I suppose every girl’s first time should be special.”

Laura rolls her eyes. The ghost of the heat between them remains, but the old annoyance she knows from all these weeks living with Carmilla is back, too.

“Why are you like this,” she isn’t really asking, and Carmilla doesn’t have an answer for her regardless. She just stands there, still grinning like the cat that caught the canary and leaning close enough to feel even without touching. There’s an itch in Laura’s fingers to do so regardless, but she can’t be sure if giving into it would end in a hug or in assault.

“You’re going to Quebec regardless of how tomorrow goes,” Carmilla says then. Her body shifts, her shoulders hunching in as she leans towards Laura as though imparting a secret. “So you might as well bang one out.”

Laura glares at her, but doesn’t step away. She can guess at what Carmilla has in mind.

Laura is an enforcer. Her job is to act as security for her teammates, ensuring that they can pay attention to keeping on the attack without worrying about taking big hits from the other team. As the team’s premier forward, Carmilla is her most important charge. Laura thinks that’s probably why she’ll be on the first pairing in the game tomorrow. Carmilla is flighty and slick on the ice, and opposing defensemen don’t take kindly to being made to look silly.

“Just don’t get into trouble I can’t pull you out of,” Laura asks her.

Carmilla’s smile doesn’t falter. She rakes her eyes up and down Laura’s frame before she speaks again, and Laura fights the urge to cross her arms in defense. But doing so would feel like losing, so she stays still. Even when Carmilla reaches up to gently brush a bit of Laura’s hair away from her face. Her fingertips leave a tingling trail of heat on Laura’s forehead as they go. Laura hopes she can’t hear how her next breath shakes out of her lungs.

“Now how could I ever let anything happen to you?” Carmilla finally asks. Laura frowns at the sickly sweetness of the question. The closest thing to sweet Carmilla has been before now, was the morning she stood in Laura’s doorway and called her she-hulk.

This game is going to be a freaking nightmare.

 

Laura wakes in the morning after a night of fleeting, fitful sleep. She slaps her blaring alarm into silence as soon as it sounds, since she’s already been awake for a half hour. Her fingers tap out a nervous rhythm on her stomach.

“Come on, Hollis,” she says to herself. She swings her legs down to the floor, sitting up and breathing very slowly to stop the room from spinning as her exhausted brain tries to keep pace with the movement.

Professional hockey players dress in business formal attire for travel to and from games, and Laura had laid her clothes out the night before in preparation of her first game day. She hasn’t started receiving paychecks, so she had to pick from what she’d brought with her from home. The outfit itself is the same one she wore under her college graduation robes: a sleeveless yellow blouse with a decollete neckline, and a black pencil skirt. Yellow and black are the Panther’s team colors, so it made sense to reuse the outfit.

She manages to get as far as pulling on a yellow slip before her phone rings on her dresser. She checks the caller ID, and then swipes to accept the call.

“Hey LaF,” she says. “You’re up…early?”

Her friend laughs, “It’s two in the afternoon here, Laur.”

Laura tries to do the math in her head, but she must have the conversion wrong. She picks up her phone, planting it on her desk to continue the conversation while she takes the rest of her clothes from their hangars on the back of her desk chair.

“Your dad told me you have your first game today,” LaFontaine continues. “I had some time between meetings so I figured I’d call. It’s a big day, really very major.”

“I’m nervous as hell,” Laura says. She’s grateful that LaFontaine chose to call rather than text. It’s been difficult to speak with anyone about her nerves. Her father is unfailingly supportive, and that’s unhelpful when she needs her anxieties to be heard rather than pinned down and forced into hiding. And goodness knows she hasn’t even entertained the thought of asking Carmilla for help.

“You’re going to do fine,” LaFontaine says. “But it’s okay to be nervous. I get a little squirrely around the rarer compounds here too, when I work with them for the first time. But everything’s got its own way that it needs to be worked, and that’s what being a professional is, really: just figuring out how to work all the little bits of your job.”

While LaFontaine is speaking, Laura hears her door open behind her. She turns to find Carmilla backing quietly into her room, carrying two cups of coffee. She’s already dressed in crisply pressed black slacks and a black dress shirt. Her black tie swings against her chest, unbound as of yet by her brilliantly yellow waistcoat. Laura slips her skirt up to her waist, making sure the slip is tucked into it how she wants before zipping it closed. Carmilla places one of the mugs on Laura’s desk, and then she leaves, just as nonchalant as she came. Laura looks after her, into the empty hallway, until LaFontaine calls her name and asks if she’s hearing them okay.

“No, you’re good,” she says, snapping her attention back to her phone. “And I know you’re right.”

“I know you know,” LaFontaine says. “So now, you know. Act like it.”

Laura laughs. “You got it, LaF.”

“Good,” LaFontaine says, as though that closes the matter. “Now give ‘em hell, would you? I have several brags of your prowess to back up, and I could really use some professional war stories to regale my colleagues.”

They end the call there, and Laura focuses back on the coffee on her desk. She peers at it, narrow-eyed with suspicion. There’s a wooden stir stick poking out of the liquid, with a hastily scrawled “4S” on the side of it. Four sugars is how she takes her coffee, but she can’t remember ever telling Carmilla that. Laura hunches her shoulders forward as she brings the mug to her lips for a small, cautious sip.

It’s fucking perfect.

She takes a larger swallow, and shivers when it burns down her throat. Laura closes her eyes and lets the heat spread through her chest for a few seconds before placing the mug back on her desk. She still needs to finish getting dressed.

Half an hour later, she emerges from the bathroom, hair properly coifed and not a stitch out of place. Carmilla is waiting for her in the living room, vest buttoned and jacket over her shoulder. Now that she’s buttoned herself up, it’s apparent to Laura just how devastating the suit is. The waistcoat is double breasted and clearly tailored. It presses over Carmilla’s breasts, only to cinch at her waist. It ends in a flattering flair at her hips. Drawn tight over her black shirt, and brilliant yellow besides, its overall effect is to suck the moisture from Laura’s mouth and sent it straight southward.

“You ready, cupcake?” Carmilla asks. There’s a hint of impatience in her voice, but nothing to give away whether she can tell that Laura is suddenly ‘ready’ in two very different and contradictory ways.

“Yeah, of course I am,” Laura says. She watches Carmilla pull on her fitted black blazer, some of that brilliant yellow disappearing beneath it. As Carmilla shrugs it over her shoulders, Laura has the stupid, possessive urge to stop her.

Instead she swallows, or tries to. Something thick seems to be stuck in her throat. She tries to clear her throat, and focuses on the wall behind Carmilla’s head to keep from ogling the thin strip of yellow she can still see.

“Let’s go then,” Carmilla says. She spins her keys in her palm, nonplussed and apparently unaware of the distress she’s put her roommate in.

Acutely aware of both that distress and how inappropriate it is, Laura forces her feet to move her past the suited roommate and out into the hall. Carmilla locks the door behind them, and they’re off.

“You look good, rookie,” she says as they walk.

Laura has to stifle a groan.

 

Carmilla keeps the soft top on the Mustang up, on their trip to the rink. It’s a rare sight and sensation for Laura, who up until now has only seen the car covered when Carmilla parks it in the condo’s garage. They ride in silence for most of the trip, Carmilla’s normally blaring rock music reduced to low background noise. It leaves Laura alone with her pre-game jitters. She fiddles with one of the buttons on her blouse, rehearsing defensive plays in her head.

Her thoughts return again to Carmilla, this time on the ice, laying waste to all her carefully laid defenses. Laura hazards a glance to her left, where Carmilla sits steering easily with one hand, her sunglasses perched delicately against her sharp cheekbones. Her jaw flexes with a swallow, and she shifts in her seat. Panicked, Laura looks back out to the road before them, defenses laid waste to again.

 

When they finally turn into the player’s lot, Laura is grateful for the barrier of the soft top. The press is out in force. The first game of the preseason isn’t enough of an event to draw much national or international press, but the first competition of a new year is enough to have brought out a throng of regional and local reporters. Carmilla’s cherry red Mustang is a familiar site to them, but Carmilla turns down an aisle to the back of the lot before they can swarm the car. She parks in one of the last spots and cuts the engine.

“Just keep walking,” she says. She stores her sunglasses in a cup holder and removes the key from the ignition. “They’ll get their pictures and they’ll move on. It’s just part of the gig.”

“Just part of the gig,” Laura echoes. She hopes it’s convincing, but she isn’t even convinced herself.

“They’re here to do a job, just like we are,” Carmilla says. “I promise that’s all it is.”

They look at each other. With the car no longer running, the air inside heats gradually, until Laura can feel the almost-shiver of starting to overheat, creeping up her spine. She swallows, and Carmilla’s eyes dart to her throat, just for long enough to watch the movement. Heat blooms in Laura’s chest.

It’s just from the car heating up, she reasons.

The buzz of Carmilla’s phone in the cup holder between them breaks the spell of the moment. Laura looks at her lap, a bit breathless as she smooths out the already-immaculate fabric of her skirt.

“We’re late,” Carmilla says, clicking her messages closed and tossing Laura a cheeky smile before she opens her door. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

Luckily for Laura, Carmilla draws most of the clicking from the press as they make their way through the parking lot and into the stadium itself. When they’re through the player’s door, though, there’s another cacophony waiting for them. Staffers, trainers, and rink personnel crisscross their way through the hallways, preparing in their own way for the coordinated spectacle of a hockey game. A few of them wave or smile to the two players as they make their own way towards the home locker room, but they have jobs to do, too. So it’s not long until Carmilla is opening the locker room door for Laura, and they’re able to shut themselves away from the noise.

Inside the room is quieter. Players sit or stand at their locker spaces, or mill about close to the entrance to the trainer’s room, adjusting pads, taping sticks, and threading skates properly. Hockey players are a superstitious lot, and each has a set of pre-game routines that stave off bad luck and invite the good. So when they enter, Laura and Carmilla go their separate ways. Laura watches her roommate start undressing even before she’s halfway across the wide space, shrugging out of her jacket. She takes the opportunity to steal a few more looks at Carmilla’s brilliant yellow waistcoat before she turns to her own locker.

Laura dresses quickly, strapping on her pads and imagining them armor. There’s a mindset to being an enforcer that doesn’t allow for timidity. So she tries her best to set her anxiety aside: about her pending move, about how weird Carmilla has been acting the last few days, about not speaking to Danny since their scuffle on the ice. None of that can matter now. She has to become someone to be feared in her directness, no chinks in her armor apparent.

She sits on the bench in front of her locker to put on her skates before pulling on her sweater. She’s pulling the laces on her second skate as tight as she can, when the light above her goes a bit dark, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Laura looks up to find Danny hovering over her, rocking back and forth in discomfort. She looks back down at her skates. She can’t let the conflict between them mess with her preparations.

“I’m sorry,” is what Danny leads with. Laura gives a tug on her laces to tie them, and maybe it’s a bit stronger than it needs to be. The extra strain of the laces can’t be heard above the soft conversation around them.

“I shouldn’t have let what’s come between me and Carmilla come between us, too,” Danny continues, unfazed by Laura’s lack of response. And Laura is surprised to find that annoying. She’s interrupting Laura’s pre-game rituals to sate her own guilt. It’s selfish. More than annoying, it makes Laura angry.

She takes a deep breath, and feels the dam of her self-control break behind her teeth as she opens her mouth to speak.

“Laura,” because it’s not Danny’s voice she hears, Laura whooshes her breath out through her mouth without any of her angry words to adorn it. She and Danny both turn their heads to look in the direction it came from, and find Carmilla sitting in front of her own locker. She’s staring a little too intently at them for her interruption to have been happenstance.

Laura also thinks this might be the first time Carmilla has ever said her name.

“Mel wanted to talk to you,” her roommate continues. She holds Laura’s gaze gently but firmly, and Laura doesn’t look away. “I forgot to tell you when we got here.”

“Right,” Laura says. She finishes cinching her laces and stands quickly. Danny backs away from her just as fast, shooting daggers at Carmilla before she goes back to her own locker. Laura grabs her sweater from its hangar before she goes, pulling it over her head as she walks into the training room to meet with their captain.

When Laura finds Mel, the captain is reclining on one of the trainer’s benches as their head trainer wraps black, oblong strips of kinetic tape around her right elbow.

“You wanted to see me?” Laura asks, coming to a stop at the foot of the table. Mel laughs.

“I’m your captain, not your boss,” she says. “We’re paired today. We should talk about what we’ll both be looking to do out there.”

“Oh,” Laura says, dumbly. She hasn’t given this much thought, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. So she tells the truth: “I didn’t even think I’d be here. So I’m not really sure.”

“What did you do in college?” Mel asks. Laura laughs. She holds up her fists, showing off her knuckles, bumpy with scars from connections with helmets and skin and bones.

“I fought a lot,” she says.

“No,” Mel says. “That’s like saying I hit a lot last year. If they’re expecting the hit, you’ll see forwards get too tentative with the puck. So what I _did_ was create opportunities for turnovers. What did you _do._ ”

Laura thinks about that. She thinks about speedy forwards with room to maneuver, of blood on the ice and benches full of smiling, howling teammates clacking their sticks on the sideboards. She thinks of the view from the penalty box when goals are scored.

She thinks about Carmilla, fast and out of balance and attacking the net.

“I keep her safe,” she whispers. Mel narrows her eyes.

“Come again, rookie?” she says. Laura tamps down the fit of embarrassment threatening to creep up into her cheeks. Purpose will do a lot for a nervous hand in a hockey game.

“I keep us safe.”


End file.
